Enterprise software estates are complex, messy, and rarely governed in real time. Licences get deployed during projects and forgotten. Mergers bring in duplicate agreements. Virtualisation and cloud blur the boundaries of traditional licence metrics. And vendors — Red Hat, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP — know this. Audits are the mechanism by which they convert that complexity into revenue.
The organisations that handle audits well are not the ones that get lucky. They are the ones that understood their position before the vendor did.
What Paringa's SAM practice covers
- Software estate discovery. Full inventory of installed and deployed software across your environment — without assumptions and without relying on vendor-supplied tools.
- Entitlement reconciliation. Licence rights vs. actual deployment: where is the gap, in whose favour, and what does it cost?
- Audit defence. If a vendor audit is active or imminent, we support your position through the process — technical evidence, commercial negotiation, and closure at the right price.
- Vendor coverage. Red Hat, Microsoft (Server, SQL, 365, Azure, Entra), Oracle, SAP, VMware/Broadcom — the vendors most likely to audit and most likely to over-claim.
- SAM tool advisory. Independent assessment of SAM tooling options — we have no vendor relationship to protect here, only yours.
- Ongoing licence optimisation. After the estate is understood, we identify the reductions, renegotiations, and reclassifications that reduce your ongoing cost.
For software vendors: revenue protection
The same ledger read from the other end. Vendors with large installed bases lose material revenue to unlicensed deployment, expired entitlements and quiet under-subscription — and most find out years late, through a channel rumour or an acquisition due-diligence pack. Paringa runs that recovery as a service, commercially rather than legally.
- Telemetry analysis. Phone-home and usage data turned into a ranked, evidenced picture of unlicensed and under-subscribed deployment.
- Channel intelligence. Structured engagement with the reseller and partner community, where most of the real knowledge already sits.
- Commercial-first conversion. Normalisation and amnesty programmes that turn an unlicensed user into a paying customer, rather than a lawsuit and a lost account.
- Internal evangelism. Rebuilding the programme's standing inside your own sales organisation, so account teams become intelligence contributors instead of obstacles.
- Delivered as a running program. Not a one-off audit sweep — a continuous engagement with reporting, pipeline and recovery tracked month by month.
A global manufacturing software leader runs this programme with Paringa today, live since June 2026, across a portfolio of widely deployed design and manufacturing products.
Why running both sides makes us better at each
An audit defence practice that has never built a vendor's case is guessing at how the case gets built. A revenue protection practice that has never dismantled one does not know where its own evidence is weak. We do both — and we hold a hard line between them: Paringa never acts for a vendor against an enterprise we advise, or the reverse. The knowledge crosses. The engagements never do.
The conflict-of-interest advantage
Most SAM providers have commercial relationships with the very vendors whose licences they are helping you manage. That is a structural conflict. Paringa has no such relationship. We have no incentive to overstate your exposure, understate your entitlements, or recommend a vendor's preferred resolution path. Our only interest is reducing your cost.
The vCyberiz telemetry bridge
For organisations already running vCyberiz managed security (CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Tenable), the endpoint telemetry from those deployments already contains device and software inventory data. Paringa's SAM practice can use that existing data to seed a SAM engagement — no new discovery tooling required. Your security investment becomes your software asset intelligence.
The Red Hat audit pathway
The most common entry into Paringa's SAM practice is a Red Hat audit or renewal event. Organisations facing Red Hat audit exposure frequently discover — often with us — that their Red Hat position is one part of a broader software cost problem. We address both simultaneously: audit defence and the migration to SUSE MLS as the cost reduction mechanism. The same conversation that resolves the audit also fixes the underlying economics.
Frequently asked questions
What does Paringa's Software Asset Management practice cover?
Software estate discovery, entitlement reconciliation, audit defence, vendor coverage (Red Hat, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, VMware/Broadcom), SAM tool advisory, and ongoing licence optimisation.
Why use an independent SAM provider instead of one with vendor relationships?
Most SAM providers have commercial relationships with the vendors whose licences they help manage — a structural conflict of interest. Paringa has no such relationship, so there's no incentive to overstate exposure, understate entitlements, or recommend a vendor's preferred resolution path.
What's the most common way organisations enter a SAM engagement with Paringa?
A Red Hat audit or renewal event. Many organisations discover their Red Hat exposure is one part of a broader software cost problem, and Paringa addresses both simultaneously — audit defence and migration to SUSE MLS as the cost reduction mechanism.
Which vendors does Paringa's SAM practice cover?
Red Hat, Microsoft (Server, SQL, 365, Azure, Entra), Oracle, SAP, and VMware/Broadcom — the vendors most likely to audit and most likely to over-claim.
What is software revenue protection?
The vendor side of the same problem. For software vendors with large installed bases, Paringa identifies unlicensed and under-subscribed usage through telemetry analysis and channel intelligence, then converts it commercially through normalisation and amnesty programmes rather than litigation.
Does Paringa work for both software vendors and the enterprises they audit?
We run both practices, but never on both sides of the same relationship. Working both directions is what makes each side better — we know exactly how a vendor builds its case, and exactly how a well-prepared enterprise dismantles one.
Can existing security tooling help with a SAM engagement?
Yes. For organisations already running vCyberiz managed security (CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Tenable), the endpoint telemetry already contains device and software inventory data that can seed a SAM engagement without new discovery tooling.