LMT Episode 05 - Interview with Easytrust

Today we have our first ‘Featured’ interview with our guest Maxime Pawlak, Managing Director of Easytrust. We have lined up a number of very interesting people over the coming months to share their expertise and knowledge in the areas of Software Asset Management, Oracle Licensing and influential IT trends in general. Maxime will also feature in our next podcast ‘Licence Management Today – Episode 05′. The full transcript of the interview between Kay and Maxime is on our blog. It was a pleasure to talk to Maxime, who is extremely knowledgeable about the Oracle Compliance marketplace and provides a lot of experiences and know how. Some Highlights below: Maxime: We’re part of the software asset management market, we are specific on that market because we only address Oracle. Usually people, they separate the software management market in the inventory tools and the software management tools and some tools which can do both of them. We can do both of them, we do inventory and we do software asset management but we just do it for Oracle and we can do it right. We can bring up value audits around Oracle licenses problems and solutions. In terms of industry customers we address, we address every single industry who are Oracle customers so it concerns every industry. Kay: Okay, as a non-technical person could you explain to me what the differences between the inventory tools and the software asset management? Maxime: Of course, yes. The inventory tools, it’s all about discovering which are the software installed on the laptops or the servers of customers. It’s about with agents or agent-less technologies connecting to that servers or to that laptops and grab some information about the presence of the software installed or not. This is the inventory part of the market and there are some tools in the market which just do inventory. They are especially focused on that feature. The software asset management part of the market is more about consolidating data which can be provided by inventory tools but it also can be provided by CMDBs or different tools which are already installed in the companies. They provide different features like the ability to put into the tool all the contracts, what other licensing that I have bought. It also provide the ability to get the data from the inventory tools and work on that data in order to reconsolidate this data with the contract information. Most of them, they have catalog with SKUs, which is the unique identifier of the software, and they are the SKU catalog and they can match this SKU of the software which has been bought with the software which has been discovered. Providing that, they can provide some compliance position by comparing what you have bought and what you have deployed. They also provide some capabilities about optimization, the software and the licenses. Sometimes they provide some process and processing of your software asset management policies in terms of workflows or integrations with third party tools. It’s a little bit different on the market. Kay: It sounds like an inventory tool like yours should be part of any SAM programme, would that be correct? Maxime: Yes, the software asset management programme could be run without any tools, but as you know you need to have correct data in order to be able to do software asset management so you will definitely have a question of “should I buy an inventory tool” or “do I already have some tools in my company that I can use or extend in order to grab this information I already have somewhere, but I don’t use?” Maxime: Well, yes, what’s important to understand about the Easytrust tool is that it has been verified by Oracle, so we’re part of support vendor verification program. Kay: What does that mean as opposed to a tool that’s not verified by Oracle? Maxime: It means for database because this programme is only for database option and management packs, the tool can be used as a source of data in case of audits. You just have to push one button and you export the equivalent of the Oracle’s scripts results. It means the process is much more easy to run this audit and you are much more secure about the usage of that tool compared to another tool which is not verified. Kay: Oracle will take the data from your tool and rely on that data? Maxime: Yes, exactly. I just want to clarify a confusion which is usually made. Data which is taken by Oracle in the verification process, it’s a kind of raw data, it’s not calculated computer data. So one verified tool is not equivalent to another verified tool because what interests customers is not the raw data, it’s the computer data, the calculated data. There are many, many huge differences in the markets between different inventory tools. Some are generalists, we do on the Oracle and we claim to be able to do it very accurately. We’ve seen that on several customers on which we work. We’ve seen different tools, there is all the provide, it’s a generalist approach. The very spe...