Technopedia at the heart of Software Asset Management
David Littman: Hi, it's Dave Littman at Truth in IT. I'm joined by Mat Marnell. Matt, with Flexera Software. Matt, welcome.
Matt Marnell: Thank you Dave.
David Littman: So hey, we are talking about asset management of large, complex software infrastructures and the Technopedia and your recent acquisition of BDNA. So let's start with that first, then we'll get into some of the other stuff.
Matt Marnell: All right. Yeah, this is incredibly exciting news for us Dave. We have been just aching to tell people about this for some time now as it's been coming along, and very pleased to be able to talk about it now. BDNA, as many will know, has been in the industry for some time and really has taken it upon themselves to be the leader that drives the best business decisions in the industry by providing clean, actionable data to a variety of solutions. And we have often at Flexera been doing the same specifically for security, specifically for SLO, for software license optimization. And then together here, BDNA and Flexera are really able to change the way that these solutions can power a variety of use cases together, where not with BDNA at the center we've got the data platform powered by Technopedia, 150 million plus data points in there. And this can really feed out to not just the traditional ones where Flexera has been the leader like the software asset management and the security, but a variety across procurement, financial management, service management, enterprise architecture, and pretty much whatever IT needs, from a data perspective, to better manage their business.
David Littman: Okay great, so just let's take us through a couple use cases Matt, in the time we've got. Let's talk about the financial side or the legal side. Let's just pick out a couple that may be new news to our viewers and really interesting, compelling.
Matt Marnell: Okay. So starting with the financial management piece, when you talk about how financial management and IT financial management works within an organization often they're looking at the data associated with contracts and the higher level general ledger. What's missing is that the data from that general ledger is often very difficult to translate down into the actual technology assets that underlie it. And so with this integration from the IT financial management systems into the data platform, now you're able to see not just that I am spending X amount of dollars with IBM, Microsoft or whoever, but now I can see what assets they're tied to, what stage of their life cycle they're in, where they are in the world. And you can start to get a better understanding of if there's a problem, like we've overshot our budget, why is that the case? Is there a data center that's not recycled appropriately or has there been a mistake made otherwise with the software licenses that is now causing us some problems higher up the chain?
David Littman: So it must make for budgeting to be much easier and for central planning. How about on the legal side? Are there advantages to this system for the legal department?
Matt Marnell: Yeah, for the legal department you're definitely going to be able to see a lot more information around legal liabilities for open-source software and other problems that could arise without really having good reference data like this under the hood. Because one of the things that we're working on is bringing into the data platform, into Technopedia, all this information that we have on our side at Flexera around open-source liabilities, open-source security problems that prevent those who are building solutions based on those components that they bring potential risk that's really hard to understand. Depending upon the particular license of these individual components that you are using to build your solution, you may be prevented from republishing or you may be required to republish your source code or other parts of your solution publicly or there may be other requirements in there that are going to affect the agility of that solution for you.
David Littman: You know, it's interesting. For companies who are managing complex software environments ... Or let me ask this a different way. Matt, who do you think is the size of company that represents the right fit for you guys? Who's Flexera's sweet spot in terms of the size and complexity of a company?
Matt Marnell: Well, both Flexera and BDNA have a long history of really providing high value to enterprises that are large and have complex problems. However, that is something that is changing. We've seen a tremendous uptake in what we consider to be the mid-market, which is already a pretty sizable customer, customers 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 seats, which these are large companies. And those companies are getting tremendous benefits about being business ready. They're ready for their audits, they're ready for their renewals, they're able to tackle the challenges around enterprise architecture more successfully because they can now plan life cycles proactively for their hardware assets, for their software assets, knowing when they become end of life, knowing when they're going to be end of life based on the reference data that we have in sources like Technopedia. So there's a lot of different ways in which we provide value powering all these different little elements of the full IT asset management and what we consider to be called technology asset management space that is so integral to companies of any size really.
David Littman: Well, it's a compelling story and it sounds like if you are a company with 1,000 plus seats, this is a technology you have to be looking at. Think of how much money and liability you can be leaving on the table or risking. So Matt Marnell, Flexera Software, hey thanks very much for taking the time to speak with us today.
Matt Marnell: Oh, thank you very much. I'm happy to be here and happy to come back whenever.