The SAM Eco-System

TagVault.org offers value to all members of the SAM eco-system, by supporting their critical activities, driving down the costs of software assurance and software asset management and allowing them in turn to add value to their customers.

Software Consumers

Software consumers - government, academic or commercial institutions and private individuals - have increasing needs to ensure their installed software is from a trusted source, has not been tampered with and is legally licensed. Software tagging helps with all these endeavors. Read how.

Government Agencies

Government agencies are bound by some more rigorous rules than other softare consumers about software licensing and assurance, such as Presidential executive order #13103 and the consensus audit guidelines for cyber defense. TagVault.org can help, both with the day-to-day management processes, and also by offering guidelines for the procurement process. Read more.

Software Publishers

Software publishers are under pressure to provide more support for software asset management and software assurance projects. Consumers need to be able to verify that they have received software from a trusted source, and determine what is installed in order to match it against purchasing and licensing information.

Software publishers' audit processes can result in punitive fines, even for organisations that have attempted to implement strong SAM processes. Software tagging can help software publishers meet demands for more transparent software installation, entitlement and licensing information. Read more.

SAM Tool Vendors

SAM tool vendors have a difficult task in helping software consumers verify their software inventories and validate them against software purchasing records. Until now, the lack of industry-standard software inventory and entitlement information has meant each SAM tool vendor must build custom tools to identify software installations for the vendors they consider most important. No SAM tool vendor can offer a tool that is capable of determining all software installations, or able to reconcile all licensing information. Software tagging brings standardization that will make software discovery and license reconciliation much simpler. Read about software tagging for tool vendors.

SAM Practitioners

Until now, SAM practitioners have relied on a variety of commercial and home grown tools to assemble and reconcile vast quantities of data. Necessarily, they have had to advise their customers to pick the low hanging fruit - identifying, assuring and reconciling data about software from major vendors only. With software tagging and new tool support, SAM practitioners will be able to help organisations to construct a full software inventory and reconcile software purchasing and licensing records against it. Read how.