Managing the software supply chain stack with Matt

The software supply chain stack: How to manage, maintain, secure and optimize it. We chat w. Matt Marnell from Flexera about all the aspects of managing heterogeneous software implementations so you know how to get the most from your investments.

 

Dave Littman:                     Hi, Dave Littman, Truth in IT. Today I am joined by Matt Marnell. Matt, welcome.

Matt Marnell:                      Thank you Dave.

Dave Littman:                     All right, so Matt is Director of Enterprise Solution Strategy with Flexera, and today we are going to be talking about the software supply chain stack. How companies procure software, manage the licensing, manage the maintenance for their entire heterogeneous software stack, and all that is changing in this environment.

                                                      So Matt, give us a very brief overview of Flexera and then tell us why there's so much disruption going on in this space today.

Matt Marnell:                      Absolutely. Well, first off thank you for having me today, it's great to be here. But yeah, Flexera exists to bring transparency and trust to how software is bought, sold, managed, and secured. Now, we see the software supply chain as being one of the more archaic ones among industries today, especially considering that software itself is so high tech. It's a bit of a juxtaposition there.

                                                      So we would love for software to be more like an electric meter where everybody just understands very clearly based on the ratings on the meter on the outside of their house what they're consuming. There's no question about it, they know they're getting value from it, they know that they're not going to be overusing, underusing, they get realtime feedback on that, they don't get hit with bills they're not expecting. We wanted to operate that seamlessly, internally and externally to organizations.

                                                      And what's happening these days to really change the industry is that software is going more places than it ever has before. It's always been a difficult asset to nail down, but given the proliferation of virtualization, iterative things, basically every device is now running software, even your car is basically just a platform for running software. Everything has software in it. It becomes very difficult to track and manage all the licensing implications, all the possible security risks and associated costs of that software, wherever it happens to be.

Dave Littman:                     Okay, fabulous. So is what you're seeing changing in the industry today just a proliferation of these applications, or is there something more to it?

Matt Marnell:                      Well, it's not just the proliferation of the applications. I mean, there's also a greater emphasis on managing these assets. There are different sets of people focusing on them, it's not just an IT back office function anymore, it's now something that's important to legal, it's important to C-level executives in addition to procurement IT. We're seeing the convergence of security and software asset management in a lot of different major enterprises, and in general we're seeing the need for companies to be getting the value here, getting to real outcomes and knowing what their position is, what their posture is so they can remediate issues much faster than ever before.

                                                      And so this really, this is pushing a lot of change into the industry and really requiring enterprises to keep up in new ways than they ever have before.

Dave Littman:                     And are there particular use cases for example, if I am a homogeneous Microsoft environment or red hat environment, what ever the case might be, am I less a candidate for a Flexera software solution than a company that has a very heterogeneous environment?

Matt Marnell:                      No, certainly not. We have solutions that are tailored for those major vendors, particularly Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, VMware, Symantec and others. In order to address the very specific challenges that those major vendors bring to the table. They have some very complicated license terms, some very complicated contract structures, and it can be very difficult to identify and track that software appropriately.

                                                      So certainly not, even if you are a relatively homogeneous environment, we can definitely help you there. When it comes to most enterprises though, we often see that there is a large diaspora of software even beyond those major vendors where they may place the major emphasis on them, but we're going to see hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands different applications, even different vendors in some cases out there.

Dave Littman:                     Fabulous, fabulous. Well Matt, I would love to see an architectural overview or a demo of the UI, we'd love to have you back, so thanks very much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Matt Marnell:                      Thank you very much, it's been great to be here, thank you.

Dave Littman:                     Okay, great. So Matt Marnell with Flexera, check them out and watch our other videos at truthinit.com. Thanks very much for watching.