The Mastermind Group

Are all your organisation’s software licenses accounted for?
Trouble tracking software utilisation?
Are you under or over subscribed to costly software titles?
Finding it hard to manage spiralling software costs?

The majority of organisations we ask these questions have trouble answering them due to the simple fact that IT Asset Management, relating to software licensing and maintenance is confusing. This is because most popular software vendors have differing criteria for qualifying software installation and usage which results in organisations falling into a costly state of non-compliance.

VIRTUALISATION
Saves hardware and operational costs but is it going to cost you more in licensing?

Given how simple it is today to spin up VMs, the risk is that the rapid multiplication of installed software applications increases the chances of license breach. In addition, some vendors add to already complex license rules by adding conditions for virtual environments.

For example, some licenses require knowledge of the number of VMs associated with a given physical server— an application may be entitled to be installed on up to 4 VMs per physical server, as in the case of MS Windows Server Enterprise Edition. Whereas other software licenses require knowledge of the underlying physical hardware such as the processor type, number of processors, and/or the number of cores. This can be challenging given that the physical hardware is hidden from the virtual environment by the hypervisor. So even if you are trying to do the right thing, it is difficult to remain compliant.

Dynamic virtualisation, where running VMs can be moved from one physical host to another, further complicates license compliance. Software licensing that is bound to physical host CPUs, may result in an enterprise drifting out of licensing compliance if a VM is relocated to a different physical host with more CPUs. Some software vendors place license restrictions on the frequency of application transfers from one server to another (mobility restrictions) thereby compounding the risk of compliance drift. Since applications are contained within a VM, it’s easy to violate this mobility rule and drift out of license compliance.

ORACLE
The licensing relationship between Oracle and the customer has traditionally been based on trust. Specifically, Oracle trust that when customers install their products they only install the products they are entitled to use even though an Oracle installation enables all features for installation by default. This coupled with complex user and processor license structures dictates that all Oracle installations and usage needs to be closely monitored to avoid costly audits.

Oracle has strict licensing rules based on the type and number of server processors running their database instances and options, but no real internal checks to prohibit use. Database administrators must rely on their knowledge of the related systems and user community to manage license compliance. Oracle licensing rules require the administrator to:

Track the relationship between the number of system CPUs and users;
Identify database options in use;
Recognize the edition of Oracle software; and
Make sure that all instances, both test and production, are properly licensed.

MICROSOFT
It is fair to say that most organisations - regardless of their size - use Microsoft products for their day-to-day business operations. Tracking Microsoft software licenses and maintenance agreements from time of contract signing to contract renewal, not forgetting the yearly true-ups in between can be a daunting and often costly process.

To further complicate matters, products are covered by volume, site, processor, named user, node locked, user or device licenses. Knowing which license types are active and where they are installed in your organisation is difficult. You need to know where the installed products are actually being utilised by your workforce or if better still, if they can be re-harvested or removed to avoid additional license and software assurance true-up costs.