By John Emmitt
This CNN article covers the story about Steve Wilhite, the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), receiving the Webby Award on Tuesday. At the award ceremony, his five word acceptance "speech" was: "It's pronounced JIF, not GIF." So, the long running debate over how to pronounce this acronym should finally be settled. But, apparently not! According to the article, many people are still insisting on the "hard G" pronunciation. The way I see it, if you name your son "Geoff", then you are the final authority on how to pronounce your son's name-- so its Jeff, or whatever you say it is.
Flexera Software has been the pioneer in the area known as Software License Optimization. This has raised a few concerns about the acronym that you get with this moniker-- SLO. It doesn't sound too great when you say 'we have the best SLO solution on the market' if you are saying it as 'slow'. But its not too bad if you say 'we have the best S-L-O solution on the market'. So, as the "creators" of the Software License Optimization space, we're saying that it's pronounced S-L-O. Hopefully it won't be too SLO to catch on and won't generate too much controversy. Then again, maybe we'll win a Webby Award in another 20 years.
What is Software License Optimization?
Software License Optimization is the ongoing process of proactively managing the software estate, throughout the software product lifecycle, to maximize utilization of assets, minimize costs and maintain license compliance. It extends beyond traditional software asset management (SAM) to incorporate strategies, and the tools to support them, to fully leverage license entitlements—software product use rights. This allows enterprises to minimize license consumption, calculate an optimized license position and reduce ongoing software costs.
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Learn more about Software License Optimization by reading our white paper: Moving Up the Software License Optimization Maturity Curve to Drive Business Value.