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Friday, December 7, 2012

How your IT department can prepare for a software audit

Facing a trying economy and decreasing new license revenue, enterprise software vendors are turning to more frequent license audits to turn up missing revenue.

A Gartner survey revealed increasing license reviews, with 60 percent of respondents in 2010 reporting being audited in the previous year compared with around 30 percent in 2007. And a 2011 IDC/Flexera study revealed that 56 percent of large enterprises were audited in the prior year--17 percent of them saying they had been audited three or more times. "The difficult economy and resultant ongoing enterprise IT budget constraints means that large software deals are becoming less common," says Dr. Jonathan Shaw, a principal with outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon.

"The worst mistake that an enterprise can take is to sit back and passively accept the audit terms, process and results."

Meanwhile licensing use-rights are being applied to increasingly complex IT envrionments that have evolved beyond their long-standing software agreements. "Software providers' reaction to infrastructure advances had led to a proliferation of abstract and potentially confusing licensing metrics in contemporary agreements, which have made entitlement tracking considerably more difficult with a risk that simple technology refreshes and environment optimizations will cause an enterprise to fall out of compliance," Shaw says.

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