By Cyndi Tackett
Do you consider software license implications during the IT change management process? Consider the following scenario: your ace developer, Jim Smith, creates an awesome business application that requires IBM Websphere which is licensed by Processor Value Units (PVUs). We will call it “WhizBang Websphere."
Jim puts in a change management request to move WhizBang Websphere from pre-production to production. This is a licenseable event – you now need to buy as many PVUs as WhizBang Websphere will consume once it moves to production.
Fast forward a few months. Good news, WhizBang Websphere is adding a ton of value to the business. End users love it and use it every day. You need to move WhizBang Websphere to a bigger server to handle the demand. Business stakeholders decide that WhizBang Websphere should be highly available to all of business users. So, the capacity management team puts in a change request to move WhizBang Websphere to a highly available cluster. Now, you are consuming tens of thousands of PVUs and haven’t considered the cost of the changes on software licenses.
Fast forward a few more months. Wow! WhizBang Websphere has transformed the business. You put in a change management request to uncap WhizBang Websphere and let it dynamically consume as much capacity as it needs. You replicate WhizBang Websphere to datacenters in Europe and Asia-Pacific to support global users. It needs to be unleashed! WhizBang Websphere has saved the company tens of thousands of dollars! Jim is a hero.
Fast forward a few more months. You get an IBM audit letter. Uh oh, Bad news. Because you did not consider the software licensing implications of all the capacity you added to WhizBang Websphere during the IT service management (ITSM) change management processes, you now owe IBM hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This is a common story. Your environment is very dynamic, but software licensing visibility and costs are not transparent. Software audits are extraordinarily painful if you lack the technology and processes required to understand software cost implications of day-to-day ITSM decisions proactively. The Whiz is gone and now you are just left with a big Bang.