Introduction

The Calculation Service is part of Snow License Manager and SAM Core on Snow Atlas, an advanced solution for license management. The Calculation Service automatically calculates license compliance on a regular basis.

The term compliance is used to indicate that an organization is legally and correctly licensed, meaning that the organization has the number of licenses required to cover its usage of applications.

A simplified example of how compliance is calculated is that you take the actual number of installed applications and subtract that from the number of purchased licenses. There is, however, a huge variation in licensing conditions, which makes the compliance calculation much more complicated. You need to consider a range of different metrics, upgrade and downgrade paths, and special privileges such as secondary use rights. Not to mention keeping track of all the applications within the organization; where they are installed, who is using them, at what time, and how often.

While manually calculating compliance for an entire organization requires an almost inhuman effort, it only takes a minimum of performance and time to process all the information and display a compliance statement using Snow License Manager or SAM Core on Snow Atlas. The engine responsible for the automated compliance calculation is the Calculation Service.

For accurate calculation of compliance, the Calculation Service needs a substantial amount of information. The whole process of identifying applications is automated and requires no action from you. For information about licenses, however, the Calculation Service is dependent on the data you enter into Snow License Manager or SAM Core on Snow Atlas. If the supplied information is incorrect, the compliance statement will not be accurate.

This document describes the Calculation Service in detail, and in addition gives an overview of central concepts related to compliance. A full understanding of compliance, what it does, and how it works is useful to help get you on the path to optimize your software spend.