Software Knowledge Base Toolkit

Different IT processes like release management, asset management and license compliance management depend on the ability of the IT infrastructure to support the discovery of software applications. Maintaining up-to-date information about installed instances of a given product across the managed environment and its use metrics is crucial to meet this need. In principle, such a knowledge base should cover all software items produced by software manufacturers that can be potentially in use on any managed environment. In order to be manageable, the discovery information for each software item stored in this repository must conform to one of a few standardized signature formats supported by the discovery infrastructure. The most significant value of this knowledge repository is the link that it creates between the identity of a software item - including its name and version - and the signatures by which an installed instance of that item can be detected by the available discovery infrastructure, or by which its use can be measured.