Software Asset Management: A rising Agenda item for the NHS

At this year’s Healthcare Computing conference, Mark Ferrar, NHS Connecting for Health’s head of infrastructure, said trusts needed to know what IT assets they had deployed in order to manage them effectively.

He also said that proper asset management was vital if his agency was to negotiate the best-value enterprise licensing deals from vendors such as Microsoft.

As a first step, the Enterprise Agreement signed between NHS CFH and Microsoft last year asked its designated resellers to carry out a piece of software asset management work, to discover what Microsoft software is being used in the health service and on what terms.

Amanda Abel, Microsoft head of licensing, describes this as “a very positive step. It is good governance and shows due diligence.” But she says trusts will get more benefit from holding their own asset registers and using them to plan investments, manage machines over their lifecycles, and monitor the distribution and use of software licences.

Microsoft has a number of tools to help trusts do this, ranging from a simple inventory analyser to the new System Centre Configuration Manager. To choose between them, trusts just need to look at what solutions they have – and what they want to do better in the future.

A personal view of asset management Brian Painting, Microsoft healthcare business manager for London and Wales, explains the benefits of software asset management to the NHS and the organisations within it. Microsoft’s tools to track and manage assets Microsoft has a range of tools to help trusts find out what hardware and software they have deployed on their networks, and to help them to manage it better. To pick between them, IT managers need to look at what they have and what they want to do better. Play it, SAM: the enterprise agreement and software asset management NHS Connecting for Health has asked the resellers appointed to manage the distribution of licences under its latest Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft to conduct a piece of software asset management work.

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