Xensam is a software asset management (SAM) tool that leverages AI to normalize and manage data about software usage and licensing. It claims to have achieved a 90% detection rate compared to its competitors’ rate of 40%. The company already has 250 customers globally, with between 1000 and 100,000 devices that Xensam identifies and manages.
While 40% of its customers are in its home region, 20% of its revenues are in North America, 20% in the UK, and the rest elsewhere. Xensam has achieved that growth with no regional presence, though that is changing. Enterprise Times spoke to Oskar Fösker, Xensam’s Founder and CEO, to find out more.
Fösker has worked in the SAM industry for over 15 years. He worked at Snow Software until 2015 when he spotted a gap in the market. He teamed up with his older brother Gustav (CTO) to create a cloud-based, AI-powered SAM solution that would effectively compete with legacy on-premise solutions built on technology from the 1990s.
Fösker commented, “We understood that we have a real chance to come in with a native SaaS solution, in a similar position to firms like Salesforce and other tools in different genres. We moved quickly on it. Gustav said he could build it, and if he did, I said I would bring in the customers. We both did our part and it has been growing like crazy from day one.”
Xensam achieves consistent growth.
The company was recently recognised as the third fastest-growing firm in the Nordics. Gartner also recognised Xensam for its SAM and ITSM capabilities. On the product side, its functionality is now expanding beyond traditional Software Asset Management.
The company has grown rapidly, initially achieving triple-digit growth and remaining strong at 60% growth in 2024. In 2025, Fösker is targeting 75% growth. The company is also expanding to manage its customer base and maintain that growth. At the end of 2024, it had 70 employees and aims to increase this by another 75% in the current year.
The firm is headquartered in the Nordics and has operations across Europe and the US. Fösker added that he expects to open its first office in continental Europe in 2025 as well.
Xensam’s wealth of data is attracting increasing interest beyond IT. Fösker sees this as an opportunity to expand beyond SAM, with interest from around multiple departments, including Finance and HR.
Fösker takes a different approach than others in this sector, preferring to invest in organic growth rather than through acquisition. Xensam is building additional modules to its platform, extending its capability to expand into other market sectors.
Looking forward
2025 will be about continuing the growth. To achieve that, Fösker commented, “(We are) building the team rapidly, transitioning from a small to medium company. It is about getting the core roles up, the foundation, the processes, to mature the organization, to make sure we can support that (growth).”
Fösker then explained his long-term view, saying, “Our vision is to move beyond SAM and grow into an enterprise data tool.”
Xensam will achieve that because, powered by AI, it is already gathering that data and has, or is building, tools to gather the data that organisations are failing to collect between solutions such as Workday, SAP and ServiceNow.
What is the Target market?
Fösker was refreshingly honest about this question. He noted, “We’re in enviable position in that we can deliver tremendous value to most companies over certain size regardless of vertical. But that’s also a double-edged sword when it comes to defining the ICP.” Xensam can serve any size company, from small to the biggest enterprises. Its AI-powered technology also delivers the best performance within enterprises. This is a good challenge, as the technology is clearly attractive to a wide range of customers.
However, Fösker recognises that the growth must be focused. He believes that the ideal target is a firm running at least 10,000 devices and using a competitor’s solution. 50% of its existing customer base has moved from a competitor solution. It makes sense, as it requires less education of the target customers.
If Xensam can deliver an ROI for those companies switching across, it makes for a huge opportunity. The challenge will be how long it can maintain its advantage.
In terms of specific industries, Xensam has seen success in Engineering. It differentiates in that sector by delivering Active Usage. It is extremely helpful for CAD products, which users access through a licensed server. With concurrent users, you lock up a license. Then, if you don’t use it, you’re bleeding a lot of unnecessary, very expensive concurrent licenses.
Active Usage means Xensam can track whether the product is being actively used, while competitors can only ascertain if it is open. For example, Xensam can measure the time you are actively working on an Office Word Document. Whereas competitors can only track that Word is open – Regardless of whether it is open in the background on your desktop or if you are actively typing.
Partner strategy key to future growth
To reach that market, Xensam has a business development team that often initiates the first contact. It is also growing its partner channel, with sales now split evenly between direct and partners. Historically, Fösker has felt that Xensam was too small to focus aggressively on a partner strategy. He believes one needs around $100 million ARR before having an aggressive partner strategy.
However, his view is changing. He commented, “Since our product is so well renowned by the customer and the SAM experts a lot of partners come to us. At the same time, the landscape is changing a lot in the tooling industry. Flexera has acquired Snow which means that what were before local players are now American. [Customers] might have had a very good relationship with Snow, but they don’t with Flexera.”
As a result, Xensam is growing its partner ecosystem. For Xensam, the acquisitions of Snow Software by Flexera and USU by Thoma Bravo create a huge opportunity. Customers that formed close relationships with European vendors are not saddled with US-based organisations. Fösker believes that Snow Software customers are now having to migrate to the Flexera product they didn’t choose and work with a culture that is not European.
How do partners benefit from Xensam?
Some partners might want to stay with Snow Software and Flexera because they can charge more consulting hours for implementations. Is this a challenge for Xensam? There are two parts to this. Resellers’ revenue comes from selling licenses.
The second type of partner is the managed SAM providers. These provide ongoing value to customers with their expertise in licensing. They may lose some of the implementation hours on a project, but that is not where the value was.
Fösker gave an example of where Xensam delivers better value when a customer buys 100 hours from a partner. A Snow partner might spend 75 hours on the implementation or keeping the lights on and 25 hours on delivering value such as cost savings, data analysis, or reporting.
For Xensam, implementation takes up to 5 hours, which means 95 hours are spent on delivering value to the customer. The perceived and actual value by the customer will be greater with the Xensam option.
Xensam’s approach to AI
As a vendor that began its life leveraging AI, Xensam has a more mature and less hyped approach to AI. It offers a front-end AI that users can interact with. There is a chatbot where customers can quickly build reports. In the backend, AI or Machine Learning has a huge impact.
The machine learning component of AI “washes” the billions of lines of data that the application has collected to surface insights. Fösker concluded, “That’s how we managed to outperform Snow and Flexera so quickly when it comes to normalization. We started 15 years behind them, and we outperformed them within 24 months.”
While there may be a use case for Agentic AI, it is not an area that Xensam is looking to develop. It is, however, investigating how AI can help with licensing compliance with the goal of making research easier for consultants.
Trends in 2025
The first trend Fosker sees is the growth of FinOps. Flexera recently acquired a Business from NetApp. Fösker commented, “Where we stand is that classic FinOps is very much about IaaS, but FinOps in the land of SaaS is less a priority.”
However, it is a challenge for many customers. With the decentralised acquisition of software, decentralized means that organisations are losing control. SAM was once the remit of the CIO and CTO, and now it is becoming the remit of the CFO as well.
The big question is whether software procurement will centralise again. Before, there were master contracts; now, there are individual expense cards that enable users to purchase software. Xensam enables customers to see what has been bought and what is being used by employees.
The Book Question
What’s the latest book you read, and what was your takeout for business from it?
Fösker replied, “I reread Ernest Hemingway’s collection of short stories (Amazon Aus, SE, UK, US). He always talks about grace under pressure, a stoic approach. In business, too many get emotions involved in different ways, natively.”
