With a new vendor trying to sell a software service any given day, it’s getting difficult for companies to know what is worth it and what is just a gimmick. Even taking stock of the software they already have can raise more questions than it answers; you sure are paying for that, but are you using it? It can get mighty confusing, so a service has sprung up to help customers understand and manage their software portfolios.

Lawrence Schwartz, CMO of SoftwareONE AG, said that software portfolio management is “when you think about if a lot of customers — from small customers who have, say, dozens of different software vendors that they work with to large customers that have hundreds of different vendors — how do you manage that portfolio?”

Orchestrating success

Schwartz told Stu Miniman (@stu) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, they look at the assets themselves and whether they’re getting value from them or not, as well as whether they are procuring them as economically as possible.

“And the last part is how you knit that together into interesting technology solutions,” he said.

Get with the times

Sometimes, customers SoftwareONE works with are in the opposite situation — they are stuck in a time warp with dusty, bare bones IT. Then they have to consult them on what software they need to bring them into the digital age. He said that combined, virtual, turnkey IT is helpful for taking the scare factor out of that leap. To that end, he said that VMware offers some attractive services.

“When you can talk about power of the security built in to NSX [VMware’s network virtualization platform for the software-defined data center], what that can do at the modular level, that becomes interesting,” he said.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE