By Randy Littleson
An interesting article over at ZDNet entitled “The Evolution of Enterprise Software: An Overview” provides some interesting insights on how enterprise software has been evolving and some of the challenges it introduces to the typical company. The one section that particularly caught my eye was the author’s comments on software licensing. He stated:
The licensing terms for enterprise software can be convoluted, particularly where large vendors have incorporated multiple acquisitions, each with their own licensing schemes, into their suites. This can lead to significant non-compliance charges for clients with less-than-perfect software asset management tools.
The reality is that most large vendors have grown through acquisition and even when they don’t, they have multiple products with varying licensing models and even multiple models per product in an attempt to cover all the use cases as demanded by their customers.
Managing this manually is close to impossible. Being able to proactively manage your software estate to ensure continuous compliance with software license agreements and optimizing your software spend requires a program that:
- Combines clear organizational ownership with
- Best practice software asset management (SAM) processes
- Supported by the right technology
The software asset management and Software License Optimization technology can be a huge benefit by incorporating high value libraries that contain software product-specific and vendor-specific licensing "knowledge". The tools can do this in a way that “productizes” essential information that would be virtually impossible to manage and leverage manually. The software license management (license reconciliation) process entails collecting, normalizing and then comparing both inventory data and license entitlement data (purchase orders and contracts) to understand your license postion. The value to an enterprise comes in the form of software licensing analysis and insights drawn from the automated application of the built-in knowledge in the libraries during the license reconciliation process.
Software license management across a typical software estate is becoming more complex due the use of new technologies, such as virtualization, that create highly dynamic IT environments, constantly changing license rules and the growing complexity of software license models and agreements as vendors seek to address all possible scenarios. The key to coping with this from an enterprise perspective is to have a global software asset management program that incorporates best practice processes, appropriate oversight and ownership by people in the organization, and automated by underlying Software License Optimization technologies that bring together the required information to facilitate decision making.
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