Click here to learn more about Blackhill SAM\u2019s Aiyoda platform.<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\nBlackhill SAM is a leading independent provider of software and cloud portfolio management services, offering the solutions organisations need to optimise their software contracts, reduce sprawl, and improve cost efficiencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It launched the software asset management (SAM) platform Aiyoda in June 2026, and gave us access \u2013 as well as simulated data \u2013 to check out the platform for ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAiyoda is targeted at organisations navigating highly complex Microsoft environments, typically with at least 100 users \u2013 although it can handle many thousands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It unifies your entire Microsoft footprint under a single console, allowing you to manage everything without jumping between fragmented applications or dealing with messy integration projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To handle the distinct demands of modern IT setups, the platform divides the workload into two specialised modules that work hand in hand: Inventra<\/strong> and Spectrum<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBelow, we dive into the two key modules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Inventra overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\nInventra is a hybrid software asset management engine that continuously tracks your organisation\u2019s Microsoft software deployments across physical and virtualised infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This includes maintaining a full inventory of all hardware and installed software \u2013 classified by publisher, version, and licensable status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It also tracks your licensable software, host licencing, and SQL Server version and edition to provide you with your Effective Deployment Position (EDP).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Essentially, it maps everything you could possibly need to know about your staff\u2019s hardware and Microsoft software, as well as your organisation\u2019s virtual machines (VMs) and SQL services.<\/p>\n\n\n\nInventra is purpose-built to cut through this noise, delivering an automated, end-to-end Effective Deployment Position across your entire physical and virtual estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, on the Inventra module, we could see all the devices within our organisation, with detailed information about each of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We could quickly see how many devices were running Windows 10 Enterprise vs Windows 11 Enterprise, for example, to manage licences.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt also gave us an overview of our VMs, hosts, SQL Servers, and physical servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of these were available in dedicated visualisation tabs, like Executive Overview, Devices, Users, Software, and Actions, providing instant access to different layers of our entire organisation\u2019s deployment.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Actions and Recommendations tabs were key, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Actions tab showed us how many devices still needed to be scanned and which ones had unsupported or end-of-life operating systems (OSs), enabling us to take action where needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Recommendations tab helped us to determine which of these tasks were most important by categorising them by priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Importantly, it explained how to optimise costs based on these recommendations \u2013 and highlighted potential annual cost savings.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSpectrum overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\nSpectrum, on the other hand, focuses entirely on Microsoft 365 optimisation, analysing user licensing, subscription tiers, workload adoption, and even advanced tools like Copilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Microsoft 365 is one of the largest, fastest-growing expenses in modern corporate IT, with costs continually changing as tenant usage evolves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Spectrum equips your team with the deep usage intelligence needed to gain full visibility into that spend, allowing you to optimise your subscriptions continuously and enter your renewal negotiations completely prepared.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis module is the ultimate toolkit for IT managers and finance leaders who need to right-size their cloud spend, eliminate subscription waste, and gain total clarity before heading into their next renewal cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Spectrum comprises several dashboards that are easy to navigate, including Overview, Users, Devices, Licences, M365 Usage, Audit Logs, M365 SaaS, and General Recommendations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While this gives you visibility of your users and seat counts, Spectrum\u2019s workload usage analytics go far beyond that.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe M365 Usage view delivers clear, active user counts across every core workload, tracking specific engagement and storage consumption within OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The M365 SaaS dashboard inside Spectrum is remarkably practical for day-to-day cost recovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It shows you how many licences you have for each subscription, and how many are assigned vs unassigned.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis includes automatically detecting unassigned or orphaned licenses left behind by former employees, as well as over-provisioned workloads where a user’s actual behaviour does not justify their high-tier license allocation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To make financial management even simpler, Spectrum breaks down license allocation by department and geography, giving you full visibility into costs and efficiency.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOne of the standout capabilities inside Spectrum is the Licence Optimisation dashboard, which answers one of the most common questions IT and finance teams face at renewal time: are we paying for the right licences for each person?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead of showing you broad averages or totals, it looks at how every individual user in your organisation actually works \u2013 what they open, how they communicate, and what they use day to day \u2013 and tells you whether their current Microsoft 365 licence matches that reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some users will be flagged as strong candidates for a lower-cost plan. Others may need an upgrade to cover a gap that is currently exposing your organisation to risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most will simply be confirmed as correctly licensed, giving you confidence to go into your renewal with clean data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What sets this apart from a simple usage report is that it understands the rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If a recommended change would create a compliance problem \u2013 because a user has archived email data that cannot exist on a lower plan, for example \u2013 the dashboard catches it automatically and holds the recommendation back until the situation is reviewed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You do not end up with a list of changes that looks good on paper but creates problems when you try to implement them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For finance and procurement teams, the output is a clear, prioritised action queue with estimated monthly savings per user \u2013 ready to take into a renewal conversation or present to a CFO as evidence for a budget adjustment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All recommendations are clearly presented as indicative and subject to specialist review before any changes are made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That means the platform supports your decision-making without bypassing the human judgement that licensing decisions require.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How your organisation benefits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Aiyoda completely transforms how an organisation manages its Microsoft environment by pairing the infrastructure depth of Inventra with the cloud optimisation power of Spectrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By utilising a completely agentless approach and focusing exclusively on native Microsoft logic, the platform delivers immediate clarity across your entire hybrid estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It also keeps things simple with a scalable pricing structure built around a per-seat, per-year model where the cost per seat decreases as your estate grows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Click here to learn more about Blackhill SAM\u2019s Aiyoda platform.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aiyoda is a centralised Microsoft licensing intelligence platform made for organisations navigating highly complex Microsoft environments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341030,"featured_media":653041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28937],"tags":[105793,100721,105792,105794,67790,31158,4490],"class_list":["post-653017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industrynews","tag-aiyoda","tag-asset-management","tag-blackhill-sam","tag-inventra","tag-sam","tag-software","tag-spectrum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653017"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653017"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":653153,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653017\/revisions\/653153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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