Organizations use software. The software should be licensed.
With the increase in number of people working in an organization, there is
increase in complexity in managing the licenses and ensuring that unauthorized copy
of any software is not installed. So there could be a situation that
organizations have software for which they do not have a license or for which the
number of licenses is less than the instances used. This makes Software License
Management a very important and critical activity of Software Asset Management.
Organizations are legally liable to the publishers if:
- They have any unlicensed version of software deployed, or
- They do not comply with any of the terms of license
agreement
Software Compliance is a key activity of Software License
Management. It has to ensure that an organization complies with the publishers
licensing requirements.
The activity that organization performs to ensure that they
are in compliance is termed as software license audit. IT departments struggle
to keep track of licensing usage. This needs the specialized Software Asset
Management Team to help track and manage licenses. There are tools to help asset
management team identify the software that are deployed in the environment. Manual
audits are also performed for a certain sample to authenticate the discovery
data.
Non-compliance to the licensing terms could be unintentional
or intentional. In case it is unintentional then internal software license
audit gives opportunity to the organization to ensure compliance. Organizational
growth and restructuring besides Mergers and acquisitions contributes to the
chaos in terms of unknown license usage/consumption even if an organization has
a good software asset policy.
On the other hand there are intentional non-compliance cases
where organization tries to save on the license costs.
Software publishers have to manage and enforce
their intellectual property rights besides ensuring that their customers are
paying for what they use. A Publisher
can ask for an audit at any time. Such audits are termed as Publisher Audits.
It is during this course that an organization could readily agree for an audit
or might decline the request. There is a typical negotiation that happens at
this stage. Publisher provides their data of what they presume is the licenses
consumed by the organization. Organization may negotiate and agree at a figure and
buy the licenses. On the other hand
there might be a dispute. In such a situation Publisher can take a legal action.
The worst for the organization can be that it may face a closure of business due
to non-compliance.
