Which services do SAM partners offer?

Last month ITAM Review readers kindly spared a few minutes to complete a survey in conjunction with Stephen Mann from Forrester Research. Thank you to everyone who took the time to participate.

Not wanting to ignore the vendors, partners and consultants in The ITAM Review community we also ran a SAM Supplier Survey at the same time.

This article looks at what types of Products and Services Suppliers are providing. In a future article I will also look at the key business drivers and the main blockers to the progress of SAM.

Firstly, Suppliers were asked which services they offered. As you can see in the graphic below consulting with clients leads the way, followed by implementation and tools. Only 46% of 176 partners claimed to offer Managed Services of some description – I see this as a major growth area once organizations get over the hump of compliance and begin to realize the value of SAM as an ongoing governance process.

I then wanted to see if there were differences in services offered by country (The ITAM Review audience tends to be skewed towards english speaking countries with heavy bias towards UK and US so I would not call this representative – articles and resources written in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Japanese most welcome!). Countries as follows:

I’ve split out the products and services offered by country. We can see that India, Germany and Australia have the greatest breadth in terms of types of products and services offered and The Netherlands has the least. Australia leads the way in terms of Managed Services and Implementation services and are least likely of all countries to also offer software licensing.

Other Services

Participants were asked if they offered products and services beyond the core six categories above. The most popular were:

• Negotiation with Publishers
• Contracts Management or Novation Services
• Telecoms and Expense Management
• Technical Support for Tools
• Reviews / Audits on behalf of Publishers (Boo-Hiss!)

There appears to be plenty of Microsoft Partners jumping on the Microsoft paid review audit bandwagon. In my opinion it’s good for short term SAM projects revenue and not-so-good for building a long term SAM business. Given Microsoft could pull the plug at any minute on your business and you have less trust with the customer. In the longer term I see more independent partners. Ultimately we should be skipping to the beat of the customer not the publisher.

Notes

• Survey conducted with ITAM Review newsletter subscribers in October 2012
• Countries participating: 32
• Total participants: 176
• Other countries participating above and beyond top 7 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Russian Federation, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. Further analysis to follow.