Lansweeper x LICENSEWARE featured in The Forrester Wave

Forrester published its latest “The Forrester Wave: Software Asset Management Solutions, Q1 2025,” a landmark evaluation of the leading software-asset management (SAM) vendors globally. The report benchmarks nine of the “most significant providers” in the SAM market, scoring them on current offering, strategic vision, innovation, and roadmap.

With macroeconomic pressures squeezing IT budgets, rising complexity of SaaS portfolios, and growing compliance and audit risk, Forrester underscores the critical importance of robust SAM & SaaS-asset management solutions to help organizations reclaim control of software spend and licensing liabilities.

What Forrester Highlights as Critical in 2025

According to Forrester’s analysis and “lessons learned,” buyers should prioritize SAM solutions that deliver: AI/ML-driven license and contract management, end-to-end lifecycle management (from deployment to retirement), and deep SaaS/FinOps capabilities for subscription tracking, cost optimization, and governance.

In short — as organizations increasingly adopt SaaS and hybrid software architectures, SAM tools must evolve beyond reactive license tracking. They now need to deliver real-time visibility, predictive insights, governance and compliance readiness, and cost control across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.

Why Lansweeper + Licenseware Is Strongly Positioned

The integration of Lansweeper and Licenseware maps almost perfectly to what Forrester identifies as next-gen SAM. Lansweeper brings robust discovery and inventory, hardware and software, across the IT estate; Licenseware layers on specialized licensing expertise, contract/ entitlement analysis, vendor-specific license rules (Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Adobe, etc.), data enrichment to better understand what’s installed, software rationalization, audit readiness, and cost-optimization insights.

This combined offering delivers a clean “single source of truth” for both inventory and licensing data, enabling IT teams to spot unused licenses, redundant deployments, and overspending, while staying audit-ready.

Importantly, the modular architecture of Licenseware, something we’ve always believed in, ensures that organisations don’t need a monolithic SAM suite. They get only what they need, avoiding overpaying for features they don’t use.

What This Means for Clients

For customers evaluating SAM solutions in 2025: The Forrester Wave underscores three goals — license compliance, cost optimization, and SaaS/IaaS lifecycle control. Lansweeper + Licenseware addresses all three. For clients already using Lansweeper for discovery, integrating Licenseware becomes a natural next step to achieve full license insight and audit readiness.

For Licenseware’s positioning: this context strengthens our value proposition as a modular, flexible, transparent, and practical SAM ecosystem. As the market moves toward more SaaS, more complexity, and more emphasis on AI/ML in contract/license management, we’re right where we need to be, delivering the right features, and avoiding the bloat and cost burden of heavyweight legacy SAM suites.

This also plays well into the cost-sensitive, FinOps-driven world many of our target clients operate in: organisations that want to manage spend, reduce waste, and avoid the dreaded “true-up surprises”, without committing to large, monolithic licensing platforms.

What Licenseware Should Double Down On

Given Forrester’s direction and market dynamics, I see three strategic opportunities for Licenseware:

• Deepen AI/ML capabilities in license-contract parsing, predictive license usage forecasting, and proactive renewal/retirement suggestions — aligning with Forrester’s highlighted criteria.
• Expand modular support for SaaS and cloud-native subscription models (not just traditional on-prem licenses), since SaaS/FinOps is emphasized heavily in the report.
• Strengthen integrations with discovery/inventory tools beyond Lansweeper (or deepen Lansweeper partnership), to give more flexible “discovery + license analysis” stacks to clients with mixed infrastructure.

The Forrester Wave Q1 2025 report casts a spotlight on how SAM is rapidly evolving, from static license tracking to dynamic, lifecycle-aware, AI-enabled software spend governance. Lansweeper + Licenseware isn’t just compatible with this new paradigm, it’s built for it.

As we continue to scale Licenseware globally, this moment is a validation of our modular, pragmatic, client-first approach. For organizations looking to turn messy license data into actionable insights — without legacy-SAM bloat, there may be no better time to take a closer look at what Lansweeper and Licenseware together can deliver.