hi everyone my name is david sapkin and today we are going to talk about normalization as it pertains to software asset management now you're probably thinking what is normalization well let's dive right in so to start before we can normalize data we have to discover data and if you're looking off to the left here you will see our discovery data and there's really three key fields that we need to capture for software asset management that would be publisher product and version now one thing that you'll note is these values can come back rather messy right we have msft project pro 16.0. forever microsoft loves to do that in terms of versioning now how do we fix that well we will run that through our content library and essentially what we have is some millions of mapping rules depending upon the discovery source and how the data comes in but essentially we will run that through our content library and normalize or flatten that data off to the right you will see that we have the normalized data again those three key fields of publisher product and version now if you look at the values off to the right you will see that we have a very clean microsoft project 2016 and the reason this is important is because when you purchase an entitlement for something like microsoft project you purchase it for microsoft project 2016 not 16.0 dot forever so when you're looking at your your software estate and you have all of these different versions they might all roll up to the same entitlement so by flattening the data or normalizing the data we can help you make sense of that on top of the normalization we will also enrich this data here's where we start to peel off pro from the discovered product if you look off to the right is now part of addition because professional is actually the addition we'll also help you to classify the software here's where we look at things like you know management uh whatever bucket the software fits into and then finally we look at the last two here where we have uh lifecycle data this is going to be dates or information things like general availability end of support and of extended support some very useful data that can help us plan and get ahead of things before it's a problem and finally we round this out with whether or not it is licensable all right so what are the steps to actually make this happen within your environment it's really these three simple steps the first step is to discover your software installations right this could be servicenow discovery it could be microsoft sccm a jam something similar like aterious but what we're going to do is we're going to take the software installations and load them into the proper table within the cmdb the next step is to aggregate the software discovery models here's where we're taking the raw software installations and we are putting them into what we would call a discovery model so here's where we look at the discovered product or i'm sorry the discovered publisher product and version and then finally step three is where we normalize the the software right this is where we take that messy discover data we turn it into that very clean or flattened microsoft project 2016 and again we enrich the data with those additional fields that you see the final concept that i want to talk about in today's session is our software normalization loop off to the left you see you right that's the customer instance and off to the right you see this thing called content service what does that mean well you should really think of this research team as an extension of your asset management team and i'm going to show you why so they're going to do work right it's going to go into the content library those library updates will be sent to you weekly so as we're keeping up with the ongoing software landscape they're constantly doing that work for you they're sending you library updates weekly now if you look at the bottom left of this slide you'll see typically we're going to normalize 85 percent or greater out of the box in our first few passes well if you look in the bottom right how do we get you to 95 percent or greater in terms of your normalization percentage it's by leveraging our research team what's going to happen is unrecognized procurement discovery and life cycle data will be sent back to our research team basically this says we didn't have a rule to normalize this this data for one reason or another what they will do is all the homework for you so you don't have to so you can concentrate on tasks that actually matter to you they will then validate the updates and those library updates will not be sent back just to you but to all of our software asset management professional users so that's the beauty it's really an idea of crowdsourcing uh you're helping your fellow software asset management pro customers and they're helping you so it's really a great way to just continually improve your normalization percentage and make sure that you're keeping up to date with the trends with that i would like to thank you and i hope this time was well spent