In a computer system that has no single place to discover all installed software applications, a software title discovery technique uses a combination of techniques to discover installed software. One of the combined techniques is an operating system predefined interface for obtaining information about installed software application; other techniques that may be employed include searching a repository of uninstall information, searching for executable files in a portion of a filesystem for the computer, and searching for executable files pointed to by other files in the filesystem of the computer system. A client/server configuration may be employed to allow collection of the software application information across a network of computers in an enterprise by a server computer system, allowing the server system to provide reports regard installed software applications.