Software management has become a big topic. Companies and government agencies have seen the need to keep control of software assests and determine if they have too little or too many licenses. There many tools that can be licensed and installed locally or hosted in an attempt to get a handle on the organizations software.

One of the Online Services I am framiliar with is the System Center Online - Asset Inventory Service provided by Microsoft. This service has a software catalog of over 420,000 software applications and is being expanded continually. This software catalog was origionally obtained through an acquisition of a company called AssetMetrix. If you are running Microsoft SMS SP2 or Configuration Manager, you have access to this catalog within these on-premise management tools.

If you do not have a great on-premise solution, you should take a look at the hosted offering from Microsoft. The January 2008 edition of TechNet Magazine had an article about this service. You can learn more about it here.