LICENSE COMPLIANCE
Understanding your license position is essential not only prior to license contract renewal to precisely meet your needs, but also continuously to minimize under-licensing to protect your assets against vendor’s audits. We can support you through self-audit to collect and review your license entitlements, reconcile licenses with usage and/or installation data gathered by a discovery tool and identify possibilities to reduce both software gaps (to achieve license compliance) and software costs by mitigation of over-licensing.
Software audits are typical way to increase revenue for software vendors. We will build a response plan based on 10-year experience with audits, protect your data and provide only must-have according to license agreement, challenge auditor’s findings and negotiate favorable conditions to remediate any gaps. For key vendors we review audit clauses in contracts and prepare a wording to strengthen your position during contract re-negotiation.
EXECUTION PLAN
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Gather and review software license entitlements (invoices, contracts, vendors’ data, etc.) to complete your license inventory.
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Collect software usage data through available discovery tool and SaaS portals and verify data reliability by checking against different sources.
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Reconcile entitlements with usage data to calculate the license position and measure amount of under-licensing and over-licensing.
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Recommend steps to resolve license gaps (by uninstallation, optimization or purchase) and to minimize over-licensing (e.g. partial maintenance termination or re-negotiating license agreement).
ASK YOURSELVES...
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How do you calculate and report license position for top 5 software vendors? How much are your under- and/or over-licensed for individual products?
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Do you need to get ready for a software audit and make sure you are 100% license compliant?
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Are you sure that all audit findings are fully eligible and justified?
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How do you know what licenses will you need for your next contract renewal?
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Do you know all existing licensing metrics available for your software to select the most suitable for your environment?
BUSINESS CASE STUDY
Oracle audit notification letter was received by a customer having Oracle database and middleware licenses in amount of € 1,2M (paying annual maintenance € 240k). Licenses were partially acquired through acquisition of a small company two years back. Some licenses were part of stand-alone solutions (embedded/runtime licenses) purchased more than
5 years back.
In cooperation with the customer we achieved to defend the audit through following steps:
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Oracle was raising a claim of penalty in amount of € 450k, after providing all required data.
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Pushed back through persistent negotiation with Oracle LMS and thanks to very detailed understanding of license terms.
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Converted licensing metrics from NUP (Named User Plus) to Processor metrics to optimize licensing.
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Contacted vendors of historical systems to prove authenticity of embedded licenses.
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Final agreed findings were in amount of € 80k, mostly for term licenses to cover past usage. At the same time, we identified unused licenses that were terminated and annual maintenance decreased by € 50k a year.