Objective of Publisher Audits

My earlier blogs shed light on Software License Management and Software License Forensics. Let us try to understand the objective of the publisher during such audit in the order of priority

• Revenue Generation: Unaccounted licenses (when more than the license procured is being used or pirated software is being used) or non-compliance to license terms mean lost revenue for the Publisher. They would want to recover such lost revenue.

• Protection of IP: At times non-compliance also leads to violation of IP of the Publisher. It is of utmost interest for the publisher to protect its IP.

• Prohibiting piracy: Unaccounted licenses (when software with a crack serial code is being used) also mean piracy. Piracy leads to lost revenue for the Publisher as well. But in this objective the primary goal is to prohibit and advocate against piracy.

• Creating and agreeing a license consumption baseline for a customer: This is more of a mutual exercise where customer even is not sure about what they are consuming. The primary objective in this case is to arrive at a baseline based on which all future license consumption can be based upon.

• Encouraging and enabling customers deploy Software Asset Management (SAM): Having an effective SAM deployed is not only beneficial for the publisher but also for the customer and enables ease of calculating license utilization. It creates a win-win situation for both publisher as well as the customer.

• Helping customer improve their SAM: We have seen that organization growth and restructuring besides mergers and acquisitions put forth a major challenge for SAM. Thus, SAM has to improve and evolve. Publishers enable their customer by helping them improve their SAM. Again, this is a win-win situation for both of them

• Educating customers on license usage, terms of usage and SAM: Here the basic purpose is to educate the customer regarding SAM, the license types and their terms of usage besides the usage of license itself.

• Internal process adherence and governance: Publishers have their internal process controls and governance. They need to comply with it. At times this triggers the audit.

• Customer satisfaction (through overall contribution towards their SAM and compliance initiatives)