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Steve Schmidt of Flexera sees an opportunity for IT user companies to use a new range of intelligent devices via the emerging 'Internet of Things'.

The huge pressure on public finances is making the government work smarter by using its purchasing power to maximise tax payers' money. The Cabinet Office's recent deal with Oracle is evidence of that – the government expects to save £75m by 2015 from this deal via a single discount for all central government Departments. The deal also opens bulk buying for cross-departmental purchases of Oracle software, and allows re-use of licences already owned. Meanwhile, as we know, the government expects Cloud services to account for 50% of its IT spending by 2015 – again, an IT cost cutting measure.

Software licencing is a minefield. The lack of standardisation in the industry means that businesses have to grapple with a wide variety of complexities as a result of software publishers either constantly changing their licence regulations, or integrating new licencing models due to the likes of virtualisation technology, which is revolutionising the way all sizes of organisations manage their IT estate. This complex and severe approach to licencing is also likely to be more pronounced in the current economic climate as software publishers strive to protect their revenues via their licencing agreements.

Some are referring to Windows XP being on a death watch. With support for Windows XP due to expire in two years, Windows 7 migration is now high on the priority list of many enterprises for 2012. Some are considering Windows 8 migrations too.

This evening's annual Codie awards for business software features a three-way tie in cloud computing, with Google, Keynote Systems, and Scribe Software all winning in the Best Cloud Application/Service category.

A slew of recent surveys has confirmed what everyone knew — that people use their personal mobile devices on the job, often regardless of whether their organization has a formal "bring your own device" policy.

Software vendor audits are on the rise, not just of large corporates as has been the case historically, but also of smaller organisations. Recently, the Business Software Alliance slapped a £10,000 penalty on a Blackpool-based building services engineering company for using un-licenced software; and a small Germany-based communications firm with just 12 desktops has been informed of an impending audit.

Q: Where did you start in finance and what experiences led you to the job you have today? A: I began my career with Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) in audit services, serving clients primarily in the software and technology industries. I left public accounting for a senior financial management role with a large software company, which led to further roles of increasing responsibility with other organizations (mostly software) before landing at Flexera Software as CFO.

A new source of tension in the workplace? Mobile devices. Workers want to pick their own gadgets. They want to bring their new tablets and readers to the office. They want to access all their corporate files with any laptop. They want to use one smartphone, whether they're on the clock or at the beach, and they want to view and email project details everywhere

Moving your software to the cloud opens up a world of possibilities, but also exposes you to a world of risk. Piracy is just part of it; there's also usage fees, audits (for both the ISV and the user), version control, updates and upgrades, distribution, and more.

In a technology-driven world, applications take center stage, running our personal lives (e.g. think iPhone and iPad), our businesses and our government. Indeed, according to research firm IDC – the government spent about $8 billion last year on software apps. And according to application usage management specialist Flexera Software – anywhere from 5-30% of that $8 billion (up to $2.4 billion) was likely wasted. Wasted on misunderstood license entitlements, wasted on shelfware because it wasn't used or needed in the first place, or wasted on inefficient processes and high deployment costs.

On Monday at Microsoft Management Summit 2012 Flexera Software announced the AdminStudio Virtual Desktop Assessment tool. I got a quick overview from Flexera Principal Sales Engineer Chris Maher live on the expo hall floor.

The promise of virtual desktop infrastructures is in their ability to save organizations money and improve IT resource utilization, explained Flexera's Vice President of Product Management Steve Schmidt. But many organizations don't have the visibility into how users and desktop apps consume resources.

Flexera Software this week released a new migration planning tool designed to speed up migration to user-centric computing and virtual desktops. The new AdminStudio Virtual Desktop Assessment is a virtual appliance with vendor-agnostic planning automation capabilities.

It seems that everyone has the key to what ails desktop virtualization these days.

With all manner of solutions hitting the channel, it's becoming increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to centralizing desktop infrastructure. One thing is for sure, however: Now that enterprises are scrambling to accommodate the growing variety of client devices in the work force, attaining some kind of working virtual desktop system has become a top priority. According to Barclays Capital, more than half of top CIOs are on board with desktop virtualization, and nearly a quarter are knee-deep in the planning or deployment phase.

Federal information technology executives are slashing millions of dollars in software spending by consolidating contracts and sharing services. But federal executives are targeting even deeper savings, forcing vendors to rethink how they sell and deliver software to the federal government.

Thanks to consumerization and the cloud, one of IT's biggest challenges today is how to maintain control over end users. New approaches to identity management and application delivery give administrators a way to regain some power.

Software licencing is a minefield. The lack of standardisation in the industry means that businesses have to grapple with a wide variety of complexities as a result of software publishers either constantly changing their licence regulations, or integrating new licencing models due to the likes of virtualisation technology, which is revolutionising the way all sizes of organisations manage their IT estate. This complex and severe approach to licencing is also likely to be more pronounced in the current economic climate as software publishers strive to protect their revenues via their licencing agreements.

The University of Queensland has had issues with software licensing, because individual faculties each have a different purchasing process, making it hard to see the software being used by whom. Now, the university has adopted Flexera to keep track of software use.

Midland Valley Exploration of Glasgow has decided to use Flexera Software's "FlexNet Operations", to manage the licensing of Midland Valley's "Move" structural modelling software.

Anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent of the federal government's software expenditures could be eliminated through better software asset management. The legislation I introduced in the House to rein in software spending at the Homeland Security Department is as good a place as any to start eliminating that waste.

43% of enterprises expect their software budgets to increase in the next two years – up from 33% in 2010, according to a joint annual Flexera Software-IDC survey of software vendors, intelligent device manufacturers, and enterprise IT executives and managers. 72% of enterprises indicate that compared to other objectives, managing software licensing and usage is important or very important. Further with virtualization on the rise, 36% of enterprises are already using automated commercial license management to manage their virtual licenses.

On Wednesday, February 8, 2012, we had the chance to sit down and chat with Steve Schmidt, Vice President of Product Management at Flexera, and newly appointed Director of Product Management, John Juris (formerly with SCCM Expert).

Paketierung wird dann nötig, wenn sich Software vollautomatisch und ohne weitere Benutzereingabe auf einem Betriebssys-tem installieren soll. Mit der AdminStudio Suite ist Flexera in diesem Bereich nach eigenen Angaben Marktführer. Sie wurde nun in der Version 11 angekündigt.

Flexera Software updated the BI functionality to its latest release of FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprises. New to the application usage management solution are predictive analysis for financial and license compliance with hardware and/or software changes, as well as new reporting capabilities like trend analysis.

Enterprise SAM specialists Flexera Software have announced the acquisition of SCCMExpert.com. System Center is a growing, popular platform and many SAM tool vendors are generating good business by leveraging SCCM data.

Für die meisten Unternehmen ist das Softwarelizenzmanagement eine eher schmerzhafte Übung: Jeder Softwarehersteller hat seine eigenen Vorstellungen.

Weniger Komplexität und erweiterten Support für benutzerzentrische Konzepte verspricht Flexera mit dem jetzt vorgestellten AdminStudio Suite 11. Konkret heißt das beispielsweise, dass Administratoren Applikationen jetzt nur noch einmal verpacken müssen, um diese beliebig an Desktops, Tablet-PCs (Slates) oder Streaming-Clients ausliefern zu können.

Established by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), ISO 19770-2-compliant software tags provide software vendors and enterprises a way of authoritatively identifying applications and supporting the complex software asset management and licence optimisation processes.

While everyone benefits, the uptake of software tagging has been slow. The industry has been mired in a chicken and egg situation - application vendors have been reluctant to invest time in imbedding tags because of the lack of take-up by enterprises, and vice versa. But it appears that the logjam is being cleared, making universal adoption a greater likelihood.

End users are interested in downloading applications to their desktops according to their needs, and they want to do so quickly and easily.

This is the belief of Tom Huntington, vice president of marketing at SweetLabs, which has created Pokki, an application platform and store for HTML5 applications for Windows. The goal is to help improve the end-user experience of downloading applications directly to the desktop.

An amendment to the 2012 Homeland Security Department's authorization bill would require the DHS CIO to tighten spending on and better inventory the software licenses the department purchases.

Now that you have convinced your customer to move to Windows 7, and have successfully deployed it, you will encounter some frustrating applications that simply don't work in Windows 7. That could be because of the Windows 7 security architecture or simply because the application checks for the platform it would run on before it installs, and doesn't find what it expects.