Take Control of Software Spend with Software Asset Management
A SAM Service That Adapts to Your Priorities
The service begins with a complimentary discovery consultation and personalized roadmap across your software and cloud estate. We use inventory, contract, usage, and business data to identify the greatest savings and risk-reduction opportunities.
Rather than providing static reports, we interpret the data, recommend next steps, and help ensure changes are implemented. As priorities evolve, our hyperflexible Software Asset Management service shifts focus to the areas that will deliver the most value.
Optional specialist support includes:
- SAM maturity, processes, policies, and governance
- Complex software forecasting
- Optimized bills of materials
- Software contract and vendor negotiation
Control Spend and Risk Across Your Software Estate
Major Software Vendors
Think Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP. These vendors come with complex licensing, high audit risk, and hybrid deployments.
Cloud and SaaS Vendors
SaaS-first vendors like ServiceNow, Adobe, and more. These carry less risk, and usage is usually measured through a publisher provided portal. But there’s high potential for cost leakage.
Tail Spend
Automatic renewals and tail spend are often overlooked. These are your smaller or niche software vendors. This is a world of many contracts, transactions, and decentralized spend that cumulatively add up to millions.
Foundations Continuous data ingestion in Acuity
Our in-house Acuity AI-enabled data platform continuously ingests and normalizes software, cloud, hardware, contract, and user data, creating a living single source of truth that improves over time and breaks down data silos.
Enhanced insights Human experts continuously analyze and action opportunities
Your dedicated service lead and specialist consultants continuously pull opportunities from the discovery layer and prioritize them across three optimization streams:
- Strategic vendors (traditional SAM and audit-risk focus)
- Subscriptions & cloud (ongoing usage, optimization, and trend management)
- Renewals & tail-spend (commercially-focused renewal dossiers for procurement)
Effort is dynamically allocated to the software that matters most, when it matters most.
Enhanced Insights Continuous optimization, savings and risk reduction
As your estate, priorities and business strategy evolve, we continuously adjust focus – swapping opportunities, publishers and value streams in and out, increasing or decreasing intensity, and ensuring value is realized rather than just identified.
Comprehensive support Take advantage of Livingstone’s expertise
Contract portfolios quickly spiral out of control if you don’t keep an eye on them. That’s why our team will always be on the lookout for potential gaps, risks and opportunities across your contract portfolio.
To help you manage your renewals more easily, we’ll improve your processes with ongoing digitization and procurement support. We also save you money with recommendations for future contractual terms, price benchmarking, and negotiation support for your largest and most complex contracts.
Evolving SAM From managing assets to managing investments
Software estates have become bigger, more complex, and more dynamic. Organizations are managing traditional licenses alongside SaaS, cloud consumption, AI, decentralized purchasing, and an increasingly complex network of software contracts. As a result, significant software expenditure can sit outside the traditional SAM perimeter, spanning SaaS, cloud services, renewals, tail spend and decentralized purchasing.
That’s why at Livingstone, we believe the industry needs to move from Software Asset Management (SAM) to Software Investment Management (SIM). SIM takes the valuable data and expertise of SAM and applies them to the broader question of business value.
It’s a shift from tracking assets to managing investments that deliver returns, and from point-in-time compliance to continuous insight, optimization and value realization.
Recognized for Software Asset Management Leadership Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Software Asset Management Managed Services
Livingstone has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Software Asset Management Managed Services and was positioned highest for Ability to Execute.
FAQs
How can enterprises reduce software licensing costs?
Enterprises can reduce software licensing costs by comparing what they have purchased with what employees actually deploy and use. This can reveal unused licenses, unnecessary premium editions, duplicate applications, and subscriptions that can be reclaimed, downgraded, or removed. Organizations should also forecast future requirements before major software renewals so that new contracts reflect genuine demand rather than historical purchasing patterns.
Livingstone combines software usage, entitlement, and contract data with licensing expertise to identify these opportunities across complex enterprise estates.
How do you identify unused software licences in a large enterprise?
Unused software licenses are identified by comparing license entitlements with deployment, access, and usage data. This can reveal licenses that are assigned but rarely or never used, as well as subscriptions, features, or service tiers that could potentially be reclaimed, downgraded, or removed.
How often should an enterprise review its software licenses and cloud costs?
Software licenses and cloud costs should be monitored continuously, with deeper reviews conducted around major business changes and well before significant contract renewals. Ongoing optimization helps prevent unused licenses, unnecessary subscriptions, and cloud resources from accumulating between renewal cycles.
How much can an enterprise save through software cost optimization?
Savings depend on the size, complexity, and efficiency of the existing software estate. Livingstone clients have achieved up to 38% in savings and have realized over £3 billion in total savings.
What causes software licensing costs to increase?
Software costs commonly increase because of unused licenses, overlapping applications, cloud consumption, decentralized purchasing, automatic renewals, vendor price increases, and contracts that no longer reflect business requirements. Changes in licensing models and the introduction of AI features can also increase enterprise software costs.
Ready to Take Control of Your Software Estate?
Disclaimer
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Managed Services, By Yolanda Harris, Jaswant Kalay, Rob Schafer, Charity Hooper , 29 September 2025
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designations. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally. Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.