Managing your software licenses
Posted by Yesudas Jayson Kurisinkal, Consultant, Infosys Technologies.
I have always found the term Software License Management to be quite ambiguous with regard to the features of the tools available in the market for this. Some vendors offer very exciting features like license harvesting, and consequently cost savings. However, in the last two asset management tool implementation projects I handled for clients, Software License Management was nothing more than maintaining the records of all the software licenses of the organization in a central Asset Management tool. In one case, we integrated this with the procurement tool so as to get the financial information directly into the Asset management system. Is that all?
I checked the features of some of the leading tools available in the market and realized that Software License Management is usually a generic title which includes multiple functionalities of application usage monitoring and license management.
Hence, when an organization refers to Software License Management, it is referring to one or all of these three requirements:
1. Software license inventory management - Keep a record of the Software licenses purchased by the organization with attributes like Vendor name, number of licenses, support contract etc.
2. Software license compliance tracking - Keep a check on how many instances of a software is installed across the organization and whether it is matching with the license agreement with the vendor.
3. Software metering and license harvesting - Meter the usage of the application throughout the organization, analyze the sparingly used (or unused) instances of a particular software and reuse them elsewhere.
Preferably, these functionalities should be implemented in this order to achieve complete Software License Management. Some questions to be asked before implementation:
- Which licenses are to be tracked?
- What are the licensing models (per copy, per user etc.)?
- Should we track number of instances or the actual usage of software?
- How much will it cost to track (tools and implementation effort)?
We will look at these three functionalities in detail and understand what tools are needed for implementing them, in my next post.
