Running a tight ship in a challenging economy

FASTtalk July 2009

In this article, FAST's Phil Heap takes a detailed look at how organisations can take steps to regain control of their software assets and reduce any risk from software audits through having greater certainty of their licence compliance.

In the current market conditions, the CIO who runs a tight ship has more impact and relevance to an organisation than any one particular project or technology.

That means wasting nothing, allocating scarce funds with due care and attention, ruthlessly tracking budget spend, including money spent on software licences, and taking a cold, hard look at doing the essentials such as Software Asset Management (SAM).

Challenging times for users mean challenging times for vendors too. The recession, while not wiping out IT budgets completely, has meant organisations having to revisit their budget plans, with a consequent knock-on effect on software vendors. And if users aren’t buying new programs, then software vendors are likely to turn to their existing customers to maintain their licence revenues. That means an increased risk for companies of unwelcome vendor-inspired software audits to check on licensing which has prompted a rise in the number of FAST customers approaching FAST for advice, notably on how to cope with SAM reviews from Microsoft or other reviews from tier one publishers.

Make no mistake, a software audit for which an organisation is unprepared can be a catastrophic event. At one prominent company, the unexpected receipt of a compliance letter created havoc which necessitated the use of a FAST consultant to help the company reconcile its licensing position, cleansing and interpreting data from licence management tools to help the company regain control.

The costs involved in such an occurrence can be significant. There is the opportunity cost of key staff or management’s time which could be put to better use, but which has had to be pulled off other IT and business projects to solve the software licensing headache. Then there is the cost of additional consultants, and finally the cost of true-ing up licences, which can run to thousands, even millions of pounds.

Think it can’t happen to you? Think again. Companies whose software assets are not up to date risk finding disaffected employees with nothing to lose tipping off software vendors that their ‘old’ company is extensively running unlicensed software.

The reality is that organisations who fail to keep on top of their software assets often find themselves paying over and over again for software licences they already had and didn’t need to buy. But because they had no idea what they’d bought, what their software usage is or what they had available in a licence ‘pool’, they ended paying out again. 41% of businesses are currently over-licensed. Indeed, in 5 companies alone, FAST discovered a £1.7 million overspend which the organisations could claw back.

Faced with these challenges, what action can organisations take to ensure they are not caught short by a software licensing problem?

The FAST consultancy and professional services team provides dedicated expertise to UK organisations that want to benefit from smarter IT and SAM strategies, and that want to have a legally compliant IT infrastructure.

Among the services we provide to customers are a:

Understanding the data that has been collected by an audit tool may seem daunting, but FAST can undertake this activity using its FileCruncher service methodology that provides a range of data management services that can save organisations precious time. Our software licence management tool, FAST Compliance Manager can also help companies ascertain their software compliance position to ensure firstly that there is no overspend on software licensing and secondly, that the risks of licensing shortfalls is mitigated, preventing any budgetary shocks.

The real acid test for software compliance is whether your organisation can create an accurate picture of all your software entitlement and usage rights reconciled against all software installed in-house. Making this happen can be challenging and time-consuming, especially without the right processes in place, the right tools to automate those processes, and the right external, specialist support to know how to manage them.