At RWTH, the use of software in the context of administration, research and teaching is a central component of daily work. This also means that the complexity and thus the effort of procuring and managing software as well as the associated licenses and their respective contractual terms and conditions are constantly increasing. At the same time, the correct licensing of the software used at the university and its verification in the context of quality assurance is playing an increasingly important role.

The responsibility for sufficient licensing lies decentrally at RWTH with the management of the respective university institution. Driven by the strongly increasing complexity of licensing law and the fact that large software manufacturers now also carry out licensing audits or plausibility checks at universities, RWTH Aachen offers a Software Asset Management Tool for its institutions to support them in the following points:

• Audit security,
• Establishing a connection between commercial software procurement and technical software installation,
• Central and uniform management of the software used, and
• Overview of existing software contracts.

In concrete terms, this means that the purchases made for the institution via the software shop are fed into the SAM tool, thus enabling a comparison between purchased and used software.