Enterprise IT: Enterprise software license management impacts the corporate bottom line

Managing high-value software assets can be difficult to manage for two primary reasons - the increasing complexity of software licensing and the lack of software license management best practices. Experts tell us that medium and large enterprise software customers manage upwards of 70 software license contracts, which require renegotiation and renewal at various times throughout a year. When licensing involves multi-user software with enterprise, transaction, processor, concurrent user or named user constraints, the management headaches mount.

Because IT managers lack visibility into actual software usage, they frequently overestimate or underestimate their software needs in their efforts to balance cost control and end user productivity. These mistakes can significantly impact the profitability of the entire enterprise.

Navigating solutions to the software license maze

If you’re like many enterprise IT managers, you may make software purchase and renewal decisions by relying on whatever local usage information you have available. You may manually allocate licenses and project a “guesstimate” for future needs.

While this approach has served a purpose, in real-world terms it falls short of what today’s cost-conscious businesses should be doing. Without a global view of your software licensing operations and actual usage data, you may frequently miscalculate your software licensing needs. You may turn to software asset management systems for answers. Unfortunately, typical software asset management systems are not built to handle the software license management complexities of high-value enterprise applications like Oracle, SAP, technical applications, and other software.

Best practices for software license management include five basic steps:

1. Centralize all licensing operations
   By centralizing their licensing operations, IT managers and administrators gain a single console view that allows them to manage and maintain licenses and servers across the global enterprise.
2. Leverage accurate usage statistics
   You will want to have usage data as accurate as possible. Managers should therefore avoid using rudimentary approaches to software license management. Few people will debate the accuracy and completeness of data when it matches the software vendor’s license management results.
3. Analyze usage reports
   By segmenting and analyzing usage data by project or user group, managers can gain granular insight into their organizations’ actual software usage.
4. Automate licensing operations
   Automated bill-backs, for example, can enable IT departments to establish shared license pools with prioritized resource allocation so users with high-priority needs can “reserve” a fixed number of shared licenses, ensuring software availability.
5. Select the right software license management tools
   Managing software assets without effective tools is nearly impossible. Using the right tools not only makes managing software easier, it also reduces the burden on administrators and increases end-user satisfaction.

Simply put, these measures allow enterprises to purchase and pool software licenses in a way that corresponds exactly with their usage needs. No more money wasted on shelfware, no more productivity lost from denial-of-service delays. With strategic software license management, organizations get the maximum return from their software investments by optimizing every dollar spent on software-related costs.