Software licensing: hints on staying legit

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 25 August 2009 08:23

IT Industry - Development

Many organisations appear to do a poor job of managing software licence compliance. Here's some advice from a 'gamekeeper' about staying legal.

Troy Parker is a software asset management and Microsoft software licensing specialist at iComply, a company used by vendors such as Microsoft to perform licence audits. As such, he's well placed to suggest ways to help ensure that you meet your obligations in this area.

Parker's experience covers organisations of all sizes, across many industries and the public and private sectors. Over 95% of the reviews he has performed revealed licensing shortfalls.

So what can you do to help ensure your house is in order if an auditor comes knocking on the door?

The first step is to create and maintain an inventory of licences and installed software. For an organisation of any size and complexity (say 50+ PCs that aren't running a standard operating environment), that means using discovery and licence management tools.

"That's really the foundation," says Parker.

Smaller organisations will need to do the job manually, and in any case there's a need for a process to include any retail licences purchased by individual departments as well as those acquired centrally.

Kindly step across to page 2 for Parker's second step.