Patrick Gunn

Microsoft’s recent announcement of its new Select Plus Volume Licensing programme is most certainly a step in the right direction. Clearly, the company is making every effort to listen to its customers. Large businesses will benefit greatly as this simplified plan will enable them to view licensing holistically, overcoming some of the difficulties associated with negotiating cost-effective deals with Microsoft.

However, from a central IT perspective, the complexities pertaining to license compliance remain. Today, large enterprises have complicated organisational structures, and are often split into autonomous units, business divisions and departments. Whilst this new licensing model will help organisations become Microsoft-compliant as corporate groups, they still need to ensure that their individual units and divisions are compliant too. As a result, they will periodically need to provide detailed IT information for internal audits, to eliminate the risk of potential financial penalties. This means that the arduous task of accurately tracking deployment of the software applications and their usage across their business divisions is still a critical and time intensive process that IT departments need to undertake.

Further, while enterprises will benefit from economies of scale as corporate entities, accurately proportioning the overall licensing cost amongst their business divisions and departments will be a complex undertaking. With IT departments being considered ‘service providers’ to internal users, ensuring client satisfaction is an important deliverable for IT departments. Therefore, it is imperative that license costs are allocated based on the actual applications deployed and their usage, as opposed to equally distributing them amongst divisions. Again, accurately ascertaining the applications deployed and then tracking their usage will be key. Business units will be very sensitive to receiving bills for services not delivered.

As a result, central IT departments of large, multi unit enterprises need to have complete visibility of the applications licensed to the organisation, how these applications are implemented across divisions and how they are used.

Additionally, as corporate groups enter into similar deals with a number of software vendors, the complexity of license compliance and accurate distribution of license costs from different IT vendors across each and every business division is an onerous task.

Undoubtedly, automating the licensing and compliance process is the only solution to ensuring enterprise-wide compliance. Such tools combine asset inventory, software usage, contract terms, purchase order data, and license compliance management to help businesses optimise their software investment and ensure enterprise-wide license entitlement.

This is important. License entitlement is much more than simply comparing purchases and installations. IT departments need to understand license types in the context of their organisations’ computing environments including virtual machines, servers, multi-processor machines and physical locations, along with specific vendors' license terms. With so many cogs in the wheel, it is no surprise that despite the best intentions, enterprises unwittingly breach vendor license terms.

By using compliance tools, IT departments can access reports on maintenance payments, pending contract renewals, license breaches, software usage, license allocation, license entitlement, potential savings, and contract optimisations – at the click of a button. It is an option every IT department should consider.

Patrick Gunn is EMEA vice president of ManageSoft

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