Does your IT Asset Management tool really manage licences?

Over the last 10 years, nearly every aspect of managing an IT environment has increased in complexity.  From desktops, laptops, PDAs and servers to software, contracts and maintenance agreements, the task of managing the thousands of IT assets spread across an organisation has become an extremely difficult one.

By implementing an effective technology solution, however, along with appropriate business processes, you can quickly and efficiently manage your IT investments and leverage better control of costs related to compliance, procurement, budgeting and forecasting.

When it comes to choosing the right tools, surely all you have to do is to select the cheapest one, or one which integrates best with your existing infrastructure? Wrong! Unfortunately, when it comes to managing your IT assets, there is one snag – licensing!

Most IT Asset Management (ITAM) tools fail to address the basic licence management requirements and subsequently most organisations continue to subject themselves to unnecessary risk and expenditure.

Therefore, it is imperative that your organisation identifies its basic licence management requirements and fully evaluates the technology prior to implementation. In addition, it is essential that you select a tool which can measure not only device usage but also additional metrics such as, User, Concurrent, Processor, Site – if it can’t then, your organisation will not be able to deliver an effective ITAM solution and you will be subject to  increased resource costs and operational risks before you even begin.

To help you identify thebasic requirements, I have listed below the most commonly specified Licence Management task:

• Record all licence information, including terms and conditions, and cross reference to specific proof of licence documentation.
• Record and track all licence types, such as concurrency, value units, processor, MIPs, client access licences, named users and site licences and many more. This includes managing usage information for Terminal Services, Citrix, Oracle, Midrange and Mainframe systems.
• Maintain the relationship between upgrade licences and base licences, ensuring there is a comprehensive audit trail for all referenced licences.
• Associate licences to active and non-active purchase agreements, ensuring that all agreements are effectively managed and renewed. Even though the purchasing agreements have expired, most agreements continue to provide perpetual rights to software and in many cases they may need to be tracked, even though they are no longer used. For example, they may be acting as a base licence to recently purchased upgrades or maintenance licences.
• Differentiate between contract and non-contract entitlement and ensure all associated entitlement is effectively recognised. In addition, where continued tracking of contract entitlement is required, such as a Microsoft Enterprise agreement, a function that enables automated true up calculations is essential.
• Aggregate the organisation’s installation rights by business unit/purchase centre, thus enabling organisations with multiple entities to publish their compliance status individually or globally.
• Report entitlement by the country of usage and ensure that all entitlement is allocated effectively. Many global organisations lose control of their global contracts and mistakenly allocate entitlement to countries that are not entitled under the contract.
• Effectively manage Client Access Licence (CAL) entitlement. As asset inventory tools only measure the instances of installation, they are unable to meter the CAL usage.
• Maintain and track maintenance agreements, ensuring that all renewals are actioned and that all version entitlements are maintained effectively.
• Facilitate the transfer of licences between different business units/purchase centres, thereby enabling effective load balancing of entitlement across the business.
• Distil software usage data and recognise licensable products, shareware, freeware and system drivers, thus fully understanding the organisation’s licence liability.
• Allocate licence entitlement effectively, ensuring that the correct licence metrics and constraints have been applied.
• Manage surplus licences and have the ability to reserve them against future installs.
• Report the organisation’s compliance status, highlighting what the organisation is entitled to install, how many times it has been installed or used, how many licences are still available and which software is non-compliant.
• Identify non-compliance or other discrepancies and analyse the root cause.
• Report a comprehensive audit trail of all changes made to the software and associated licences.
• Aggregate software versions, application suites and remove the technical attributes associated to software and replace with the licensable descriptions making it easier to allocate the correct licence entitlement.
• Effectively manage software entitlement across multiple geographical areas and the ability to publish entitlement across multiple purchasing centres without infringing the contractual agreements specified.
• Verify compliance for all licence agreements and report effectively to vendors in the correct format, for example the Microsoft Effective Licence Position (ELP).
• Provide an interface for managing all purchasing agreements, including associating the owner responsible for managing the terms of the agreement.

In summary, when evaluating the tools, it is imperative that the above licensing functionality is fully evaluated and that this is done in partnership with your procurement and IT teams. If the chosen tools do not provide the correct management information for these departments, then the application is doomed from the start and the procurement team will continue to make ill-informed decisions based on incomprehensive data.

Although many vendors proclaim that their asset management solutions manage the full lifecycle of a licence, it is advised that you thoroughly test this declaration and ensure that all associated licence dependencies can be maintained and managed. In our experience, this is generally not the case and probably explains why our tool has become the leading licence management solution in Europe - we have had to integrate with hundreds of different tools that have failed to deliver this requirement.

Licence Dashboard can interface with some of the most comprehensive asset management tools, such as IBM Tivoli, HP AssetCenter, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and many more. The main business driver of this application is to extend the licensing functionality of asset management tools and enable effective control of an organisation’s compliance and software procurement lifecycle - ultimately reducing illegal and financial exposure.