Software License Management Tools, Systems and Solutions

Improve your license management procedures and policies

Software asset management (SAM) and compliance has been an increasingly urgent matter recently, driven by a new ISO standard, many software license vendors are intent upon growing their revenue through the more agressive imposition of software license compliance, legal pressures from new legislation in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley, and there are, of course, also internal business pressures to control software procurement expenditure more effectively. Never has personal and corporate risk to software license management compliancy been higher, or the need for effective software asset management more important.

Software Asset Management Audit and Consultancy Company

Our approach to software asset management (SAM) is independant of software license vendors, software license management system vendors and regulatory bodies and we are not volume software suppliers, meaning that our clients' licensing status remains confidential from regulators, software resellers and vendors. With our expert industry knowledge you will benefit from an intimate understanding of how regulators and software vendors operate, allowing you to maximise your benefit in terms of cost savings, risk management and optimising administrative and operational efficiency.

Software licence management is frequently highlighted as a priority concern and even source of anxiety for many organisations. The subject is frequently challenging and will always be administration intensive touching areas such as negotiation, buying, builds, software deployment, contract, legal, reporting, document management and more.

Effective Software License Management Considerations

There are five fundamental considerations which all need addressing in order to gain, maintain and manage effective control of your software license estate position:

• Controlling your purchases and building up a historical proof of purchases and a licence net position
• Collecting good quality data on what proprietry software is deployed
• Defining good processes on software moves and changes and dealing with software packaging and deployment
• Managing licence entitlement including the complexities of licensing policies and establishing licence pooling and harvesting
• Performing reconciliation of deployed / consumed software vs. entitlement

The common denominator for all these challenges is a trusted software licence entitlement repository with underpinning procurement workflow and license supplier contracts. The software licence system repository is used to capture historical and new licence information with the proof of purchase and licensing details. This information can then be reconciled with data coming from the Discovery tool to produce a compliance overview upon most common software licence types. The licensing tool will also enables software licence pooling to be used, so that if spare licences can be recycled then these can be deployed rather than making new software license purchases.

Finding the right software licensing systems and tools can be a big challenge primarily owing to the immaturity of the software asset management tool and license management software solution market and the types of system available either of the database (simple) or workflow-database (advanced) variety, and compatibility with existing network and software/hardware infrastructure of your business. We can give you a truly independent assessment of the few mature software licensing systems and solutions on the market and help you to improve and streamline your processes and procdecures so that you can achieve software licence management compliancy that agrees with your business risk requirements.

Related information: How enterprises can save money on software licensing article

Related information: Discover the benefits of Open Source software

Note: If you have bought Microsoft volume licenses with training vouchers, you can redeem these on any of our public Microsoft Training courses.

Back to top