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The xAssets SAM engine is an enterprise-ready Software Licensing Compliance system built with the following design goals:
The system is built around temporal accounting principles. This allows you to prove compliance at any point in time.
Once compliant, it's easy to stay compliant, and you are ready for an audit with no preparation needed. A powerful affinity model allows you to control licensing priorities, requirements, and scope without the need to assign every license.
The system keeps itself up to date as follows:
This means your SAM consultants are mostly engaged in these processes:
Enterprise implementations can be completed in short timescales because the source data is pushed through the same recognition engine regardless of source. Discovery and integrations like SCCM, Tanium, ServiceNow and Intune can feed the license model.
xAssets has an excellent architecture to achieve compliance quickly:
The out-of-the-box configuration fits most organisations. Easy configurability extends the system to exact requirements.
The calculation engine is fast and designed to handle complex licensing scenarios. For example, a 32-core server might be covered by two 16-core licenses from different purchase orders, even from different time periods. A license pool may be departmental, location based, country specific, or globally available. A current-version license covers earlier versions under specific downgrade rules. The xAssets SAM engine handles each of these scenarios out of the box.
The temporal calculation engine provides an accounting-style transaction based mechanism for storing software compliance related events. There are three main events:
Consumptions are posted on the asset's date in service, or when the software was installed. Licenses are posted on the date the license comes into service. Grants are posted on the date the grant is awarded, that is, when a consumption receives a covering license. The engine can optionally swap previous assignments to optimise costs when material changes occur.
Recalculating any period deletes transactions from that period forward and recreates them, preserving prior history. Effective license position can be reported at any point in time.
Every license-consumption pair is ranked for affinity matching and requirements compliance across predefined dimensions including:
New dimensions can be added for any field in the computer and license asset data structures.
Core based affinity works similarly
These rules are configured within the "Affinity Rule Engine" and many other forms of affinity can be accommodated. Licenses for a product are considered against all consumptions of a product, and within the constraints of your predefined allowed requirements, the license-consumption pair with the highest affinity will get matched first.
Recognition matches discovered titles to a unique manufacturer, product, edition and version. xAssets uses a recognition database combined with pattern recognition engine termed "MPEV" — Manufacturer, Product, Edition, Version. A single rule for "Microsoft Visio Professional" resolves "Microsoft Visio Professional 2019", "Microsoft Visio Enterprise 2024" and "Microsoft Visio Standard 2026", because the year and edition are extracted from the title text at recognition time.
All software recognition issues are resolved by xAssets without customer involvement. They are added to the central recognition database, and published to every hosted and on-premise installation.
xAssets Network Discovery is the same engine used in the IT Asset Management product. Discovery is agentless on managed networks, with optional agents for off-network and work from home endpoints. The discovery engine covers Windows, VMware ESX, Linux, Unix, Apple Mac, IBM AIX, SNMP equipment and SSH equipment.
For SAM, the relevant outputs are:
The discovery information passes through the recognition engine and this drives the license calculation. CPU cores are used for per-core licensing, physical processors feed into per-processor licensing, and virtual or physical status is used where licenses require separate allocation strategies.
xAssets ships with prebuilt integrations including the following:
New integrations can be built either as part of an implementation project or post-implementation.
xAssets SAM is available as part of the Enterprise Edition of xAssets IT Asset Management Software.
Free instances are free forever and can show demo data or your data.
Achieved our targets in half the time
We needed agentless discovery, strong reporting and BI, notifications and workflows adjusted to fit our processes. This was done quickly and efficiently by the implementation team. We were up and running within a couple of days and we can use the product from any mobile device or browser so we don't have to maintain clients or agents. Very happy.
Pros: The implementation team are awesome. We provided them with a simple list of needs and they were able to go far beyond this in a relatively short time scales just from their experience and insight. Within a couple of days we had a full network discovery of 4,000 nodes completed, and SCCM integration was completed for our NJ network as soon as access was granted.
Cons: Not much to complain about, the software itself is very good. Reporting in SAM and ITAM will always be complex, but the query drilldown capabilities within the product allowed us to build a custom set of onscreen reports very quickly so we can see exactly where our ITAM function needs attention
Allocation rules are defined in a configurable ruleset which can be changed in the user interface. Built-in rules cover department, location, cost-centre and custodian matching, with exact and hierarchy variants, plus CPU architecture and core-count preferences. Custom rules can be added per customer using calculated fields. Direct asset-to-license assignment overrides affinity where required.
Every SAM metric is available as a calculated field that can be combined with any other asset attribute in user-defined queries and reports. Field names prefixed with "Product" aggregate across all licenses for a product; the other fields are computed at the individual license level.
Click here to view a table of Calculated Fields available to SAM queries and reportsEach product and license can carry a scope which allows department, location or cost-centre matching either as a preference, or as a requirement. A license for the New York office can be restricted to assets in New York, or can prefer assets in New York (or in sub-locations within New York). When installed on the product, all licenses follow the rule unless a license contains a more specific rule. Defaults inherit from the product catalogue, so scoping can be set once and applied globally.
Two or more licenses can be used to cover a single consumption. For example, a 32-core server bought in 2022 with a 16-core license, topped up with a second 16-core license in 2024, is fully covered. Both licenses are attributed and both purchase events appear on the license records.
Downgrade rules can be set per product and can be "any earlier version", "one version back", or "no downgrade". Both giver and receiver perspectives are reported. Free editions (Express, Developer, Community) are tracked as consumptions without grants and do not consume paid capacity.
Discovery and integrations feed the license model through the recognition engine, so a CMDB cleanup project is usually unnecessary regardless of the data source. In most implementations, sourcing and reconciling license evidence is the most time-consuming task.
| Number of endpoints | Expected implementation time |
|---|---|
| 1,000 | 1-2 weeks |
| 5,000 | 2-8 weeks |
| 10,000 | 1-3 months |
| 50,000 | 2-6 months |
The query and calculation engines have been designed to be scalable and fast. Typical response times from testing are listed below:
| Number of endpoints | Expected query response times | Expected calculation time for one month | Expected calculation time for all time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | < 1 second | < 1 second | < 1 second |
| 5,000 | 1-3 seconds | 10 seconds | 30 seconds |
| 10,000 | 2-5 seconds | 25 seconds | 1-2 minutes |
| 50,000 | 3-8 seconds | 1-2 minutes | 5-10 minutes |
Both models are supported. xAssets SAM is available as a hosted service in our data centres, or on-premise in a customer data centre.
Native agentless discovery covers Windows, VMware ESX, Linux, Unix, Apple Mac, IBM AIX, SNMP and SSH equipment. A discovery agent is provided for work-from-home computers and remote endpoints. Integration sources include Intune, SCCM, Tanium, and ServiceNow. Custom integrations are delivered as configuration.
Per user, per computer, per physical core, per physical processor, concurrent user, and subscription. Free and developer editions are tracked as consumptions without grants. Points-based licensing scenarios can also be supported by the calculation engine.
Multi-license coverage, downgrade rules, per-license scope rules and direct assignment are supported by the engine. Customer-specific rules can be added through configuration without source-code changes.
The engine supports both affinity based rules and hard requirements. Product and license scopes can be applied to affinities and requirements.
