Great Product, with rooms for improvement
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Software License Management of on-prem products SaaS Usage of Cloud products
Pros
- Visibility of Applications, User, devices in your estate
- License compliance reports
- SaaS Usage Visibility
- Shadow IT Visibility
Cons
- SaaS connectors are not always kept up to date usually when Publishers make changes to their Portal API's. Appears to be little active monitoring on Flexera/Snow Atlas' side unless a customer reports an issue with the data being returned. Fixes are normally implemented as as quickly as possible, depending on whether it is considered a Bug Fix or a Feature Enhancement.
- Users - Snow on SAM - No ability to add or bulk import manually. Completely reliant on AD Discovery or Entra ID Discovery
- Users - SaaS module - No ability for bulk update of Users for things line 'Online only' or 'Qualified' user accounts. This is an issue in larger companies where you have thousands of SaaS Users being reported through connectors like Microsoft E365.
- SaaS module Dashboard does not allow for filtering of insights to a specific Publisher.
- Not all Back end SMACC functionality form Snow License Manager have been exposed to the front-end access, as Snow Atlas does not allow customer Administrators access to the back end or SQL databases.
- If you are migrating from on-prem Snow License Manager to Atlas, migration tools have not been created by Snow and will require a Project to handle your migration. Without Migration tools, we had to use a Managed Service Partner who had to manually create a lot of their own scripts to retrieve data that cannot be downloaded via reports and imported into Atlas. Any attachments documentation on Agreement or License Records has to be manually re-attached/uploaded to the relevant Agreement/License records in Atlas as the migration was performed.
Return on Investment
- Rationalising renewal numbers down to only what you need, factoring in people who request software and hardly/never use it
- Tracking Named User license assignments
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Snow License Manager