ROLE OVERVIEW
The ESAM Manager owns the Enterprise Software Asset Management and Corporate License Hosting service as a single 24x5 operation. The remit runs from the front of the funnel — unlisted software intake and due-diligence gating — through contract and renewal governance in Deal Radar, publisher relationships and licence-compliance risk, automated reclamation and cost avoidance, M&A software integration, and the health of the floating-licence servers behind Corporate License Hosting. Software is the largest and most contract-sensitive category in the portfolio, and the client — not Astreya — is the licensee on every agreement, so the manager's core obligation is that no commitment, signature or compliance exposure is ever created outside the client's own authority.
The manager leads 14 people across three IST-anchored shifts, sitting on the EMEA window to overlap both the APAC handover and the start of the NAMER peak. The role sets shift structure and escalation paths, owns the service levels each shift is measured against, and is the senior point of contact to the client's ESAM technical leads, procurement, finance and legal counterparts. Above the queue work, the manager is accountable for the commercial outcomes the service exists to produce: renewals landed on the 180-day timeline rather than as emergencies, licence positions pruned before they are renewed, and high-volume publishers moved off manual handling and onto automation.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
1. Team Leadership & 24x5 Shift Governance
- Lead a 14-person team across the APAC, EMEA and NAMER shifts — three Level III shift leads, six Level II analysts and five Level I associates — owning structure, rota, capacity and succession.
- Own shift handover discipline: define what must pass between shifts, hold the leads to it, and make sure nothing stalls in the gap between two windows.
- Set objectives, run performance reviews, and build the progression path from Level I through to shift lead, including cross-training so no shift is a single point of failure.
- Own SOP currency, onboarding and knowledge management across both the transactional SAM workflows and the technical CLH procedures.
2. Contract, Renewal & True-Up Governance
- Own the integrity of Deal Radar as the system of record — the one-contract-one-DRID rule, the DRID changelog that preserves lifecycle history, and correct event typing across new contracts (-NEW), renewals (-REN), true-ups (-TUP) and predict-and-purchase (-PNP).
- Govern the 180-day proactive renewal timeline end to end: Initial Licence Position at 180 days, domain Invest/Maintain/Divest sentiment and compliance gates at 120, funding and cost-centre transfers at 90, Final Licence Position at 60, terms locked at 30, and execution at 15.
- Enforce the spend-authority gates — Final Licence Position validated before renewal, and the Spend Authority Committee pack completed and signed by the client's finance leadership for any deal above US$2M.
- Hold the line on signature authority: agreements are executed only by the client's director-level signatories, and no member of the team signs or e-signs anything.
- Ensure inactive licences harvested through gHive campaigns or manual outreach are pruned from the renewal baseline before the Final Licence Position is set, so the client never renews shelfware.
3. Publisher Relationships, Compliance & Risk
- Serve as the senior licensing authority, leveraging deep expertise in SaaS, on-prem, and cloud models to lead negotiation-support efforts for the strategic publisher portfolio (e.g., Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon) and preserve maximum commercial leverage.
- Orchestrate proactive stakeholder communications, ensuring Procurement, Legal, and Security teams are aligned on unlisted requests and renewal timelines long before deadlines to avoid administrative bottlenecks.
- Apply technical licensing expertise to govern compliance across floating (CLH) and consumable-credit models, translating complex usage telemetry into actionable risk-mitigation strategies for client leadership.
- Own audit readiness and audit defence — entitlement versus deployed and consumed positions, evidence retention, and publisher audit response.
- Coordinate Semi-Annual Business Reviews and scorecards for the publishers in scope, and drive action items to closure.
4. Cost Avoidance, Automation & Reporting
- Own the cost-avoidance programme: reclamation campaigns, high-risk versus low-risk deprovisioning policy, and the accuracy of the licence-reclaim audit table that feeds the savings dashboards.
- Apply the automation threshold — any publisher exceeding 1,000 transactions a year is a candidate for a Business Requirements Document and a move to robotic process automation or native vendor APIs.
- Own the reporting calendar and its quality: monthly performance and licence-utilisation reporting, quarterly chargeback data to finance, semi-annual business reviews, and the weekly and daily operational trackers.
- Own M&A software integration as a programme — inventory tracker build, publisher and title validation, third-party embedded technology scope filtering, termination execution and formal handoff on integrations running beyond a year.
- Report service performance to client and Astreya leadership, and surface risk early rather than at the point of breach.
PERFORMANCE & SERVICE LEVELS
Indicative performance targets for the role; final service levels are confirmed on engagement and measured per shift.
- Coverage Integrity: sustain unbroken 24x5 coverage with every handover completed and logged, and no queue left unowned between shifts.
- Team SLA Attainment: hold the service to its committed turnaround targets — listed software within 3 days, standard SaaS provisioning within 1 day, and CLH-critical issues within the 4-hour SLA.
- Renewal Discipline: 100% of renewals and true-ups worked to the 180-day milestone schedule, with no contract reaching expiry without an approved position.
- Deal Radar Data Integrity: maintain the one-contract-one-DRID rule and complete event typing, with the changelog kept current so lifecycle history is never lost.
- Compliance & Authority: zero agreements executed outside the client's director-level signature path; 100% of unlisted requests through the required security and legal gates.
- Cost Avoidance: deliver the agreed annual reclamation and savings target, evidenced in the licence-reclaim audit table.
- Automation: convert every publisher crossing 1,000 transactions a year into an automation candidate with a Business Requirements Document raised.
- People & Capability: performance reviews and development plans for 100% of direct reports, cross-shift cover for every critical skill, and attrition below the agreed target.
TOOLS & SYSTEMS
- Contract & Entitlement Systems: Deal Radar as the contract database of record, Flexera / ServiceNow SAM for entitlement and consumption tracking, and publisher and product portfolios.
- Intake, Legal & Security Gating: the enterprise ticketing queue (GUTS) and Buganizer, the unified intake tracker, vendor security assessment tooling, and Pactfinder / Accord for legal review and contract execution.
- Automation & Reclamation: gHive automated harvesting and UiPath robotic process automation, plus native vendor APIs for high-volume publishers.
- Financial & Procurement: SAP Materials Management for purchase orders and three-way matching, the buying-hub requisition path, and Herald for accruals and bottom-up forecasts.
- CLH & Monitoring: floating-licence servers with FlexNet daemons and the Altair Floating License Monitor for concurrent-usage metrics.
REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE
Mandatory
- 10–14+ years in software asset management, software category management or software procurement, including 4+ years managing a multi-shift or multi-region operations team.
- Deep command of software licensing models — SaaS user-based, installed device-based, cloud-hosted, floating/concurrent and consumable credits — and the compliance implications of each.
- Proven ownership of a renewal and true-up calendar at scale, including licence-position analysis, shelfware reduction and negotiation support for high-value publishers.
- Track record of running a licence-compliance and audit-defence posture, with evidence discipline that survives publisher audit.
- Experience leading a 24x5 or follow-the-sun service with formal handover controls and per-shift service levels.
- Demonstrated cost-avoidance delivery through reclamation, right-sizing and automation.
- Excellent English communication and the judgment to hold a compliance line with senior client stakeholders, publishers and resellers.
Preferred
- Certification in software asset management or IT asset management (for example IAITAM CSAM, ITIL, or a Flexera / ServiceNow SAM credential).
- Hands-on background in Corporate License Hosting or floating-licence server operations (FlexNet daemons, licence file changes, concurrent-usage monitoring).
- M&A software integration experience — inventory tracking, publisher normalisation, embedded-technology scoping and legacy terminations under privacy constraints.
- Experience displacing or transitioning an incumbent operational partner without service loss.
- Automation and analytics literacy — robotic process automation, vendor APIs, and BI reporting on utilisation and savings.
