Dear SAM
I’m not a big fan of religion I must say (suitable quote on religion linked). Like most people, I choose parts that sit well with me, avoid others that don’t. Some stories in the old testament inspired me, although perhaps not for the quest for heaven, at least a situation corresponding to an expression I learned in Germany: “Ordnung muss sein”, but let’s leave “Hans” out of it(although it can be argued that after 10 years in IT one is preconditioned or fated for insanity, in which case Hans is “on the table”).
To some SAM is just a word, abbreviation, concept, philosophy. To me, it has been a large part of my life. It’s been growing in importance ever since a cold December evening, when I, almost 20 years ago, read my first EULA and realized what it meant, e.g what I can do with my copy of Windows 95a. Some of you might not even remember it, OEM licensed operating system, through the hardware vendor, which I won’t mention in this example. At the time there was no SAM, nor did anybody really spend much time reading license agreements. To me, however, this simple act opened a new world, which I started understanding and thus my journey began.
And so I decided to choose “writing on the wall” to lead the first post ever, on “this” topic, on this blog. Those who are interested in finding out what the words mean will have an easy time finding articles explaining the story.
For me, these words are an instruction, on how to perform a … reconciliation.
Reconciliation to me is … the brains of SAM.
It applies at many moments, levels, with many tasks, and leads to one end. It puts the X on the map. It tells us, where we are.
I took part in a webinar recently which was demonstrating the capabilities of an ITSM “type” tool, specifically introducing the possible SAM module. A huge part of this presentation was referring to reconciliation at various stages of various processes. It was a typical sales pitch, sporting some sort of “TAM” person (technical account manager) who operates some wording but had troubles with particulars.
It may have made impressions on others, as on the other end they were referring to questions, which were neither mine nor my partners, but this could be also just part of the presentation. Can’t blame a guy for trying to sell… What bothers me is that no answers nor information was provided on defining the product use rights, which in end are part of reconciling installs/instances, towards entitlements. Among few, or many more things.
It seemed as if I knew what he will be using as an example, ahead of time, which begs the question: are they only using SAM cliches as an intended pun for an “understanding audience”, or was this used to impress someone who has issues understanding the particulars of SAM, while wishing to get rid of the problem, buying some tool?
I do not know, and this most likely bothers me the most, that I don’t know, of course… What I do know is that if it was up to me, our team, as it is, we would build, as we have before, our own sets of tools to inventory, reconcile and report the current targeting window, meaning 90 (or less/more) days of the time we are evaluating.
I’ve seen over the years a few tools capable to assist the procurement, accounting, and SAM team at once, but they addressed only part of the problem and these are the best. There’s no tool known to me today, that is able to address it all, and let’s be frank, it doesn’t matter how many people you have for how many devices/users, it will never be enough.
Dearest SAM, on my journey, I have had the honor of working with 1 team, throughout the time, which was capable to address most occurrences, issues, challenges and this has been within the last 5 years, only 1.
This is also the smallest, most compact team I’ve ever worked with. Most of my letters to you will address SAM from the perspective of happenings, problems, challenges, issues, heartbreaking or mind-blowing difficulties, spirit-crushing decisions, that I, as part of the team, had a pleasure to be part of. For obvious reasons I will mask most details, however, I’ll try to post the challenges themselves as clearly, I can without giving away the details I have promised to withhold once.
1+1=1, when applying for PUR + benefits; although when on X, then 1=1 -this would be a fictional formula interpreting 1 product under specific conditions and its PUR, including benefiting conditions, when it is possible (paid for) and in another setting counted differently. In other words, reconciling your licensed rights under your entitlement.
Given that licensing agreement in “separate” settings permits one thing, maintenance may permit another and in specific environments, it may be an entirely different thing. We are speaking about license migration, downgrade rights, other rights…
In terms of end-user scenarios in multi-device per user environments, having automated “request to delivery”, “0 or light touch” installation and provisioning solutions, so many things may go wrong, simply because capping an AD access group is a bit of a challenge, while membership in device/user collections permits limited logic.
The basic truth seems to be that vendors have no interest in their customers being compliant because this would eliminate or limit their profits from add-purchase and/or compliance fines, enforced by audit results and inability to at all times maintain full integration of all systems required to automate some parts of SAM completely.
There’s however an ever-growing myriad of tools providing a percentage of needed functionality, costing a huge chunk of IT budgets, promising “gold and green forests” -as we say in Swedish, and delivering additional issues to get results of the limited functionality…
And so as my friend did put it once or twice, beware, terms and conditions may apply…
