Licence Management Made Easy

There's no getting away from it, software licence management is a black art, a procedure that many organisations tend to ignore due to its complexity. Licensing terms and conditions have always been written in a confusing language and, if that is not challenging enough, vendors continue to change their terms on a regular basis. If an organisation does not employ a Software Licensing Expert or have a proactive reseller, it can end up spiralling into an abyss - a dark place where it is subjected to great operational risk.

Some organisations, however, feel they are immune to this risk, believing they have already invested in tools that will prevent them from slipping in to this 'dark place' ... often they are just crossing their fingers.

LICENCE MANAGEMENT CHECKLIST

Detailed below is a list of the essential tasks required to ensure that your organisation has implemented the fundamental requirements of licence management. Without carrying out these tasks, your organisation is at risk of illegal exposure and excessive spend.

Licence Inventory

• Record the full licence description and note the manufacturer's SKU number
• Associate the acquired licence to the correct purchasing agreement
• Retain the physical evidence and associate this to the Licence Inventory
• Record the relevant purchase history information (i.e. Purchase Order, Purchase Date and Invoice Number)
• Record and track all licence types, such as Device, Concurrency, User, Processor, CAL and hundreds more
• Associate the correct licence model (Perpetual, Upgrade etc) to all acquisitions, thereby ensuring that the associated dependencies are adhered to and monitored
• Record licence constraints, such as OEM, CAL, FPP, Upgrade and Maintenance Renewals
• Monitor Proof of Licence Status (i.e. Order Acknowledgements, Official Licences)
• Reference Upgrade and Maintenance renewals with the correct base licences
• Continue to manage redundant or invalid licences, ensuring all entitlement is fully utilised
• Continue to monitor and control agreements, ensuring that all purchasing discounts are maximised and current

Licence Entitlement

• Differentiate between contract and non-contract entitlement
• Aggregate your licence entitlement accurately, ensuring that maintenance is correctly aggregated and your entitlement is maximised
• Manage and control surplus licences, ensuring licence availability is reported and prompts effective and legal licence harvesting
• Manage and control Maintenance renewals, ensuring effective use of entitlement and reduce cost of ownership
• Provide a comprehensive audit trail of all aggregated licence entitlement
• Enable control of transferring licences between business areas
• Effectively manage and control the distribution of licence entitlement associated to global contracts

Software Usage

• Identify all licensable products installed on the organisation's network
• Ensure that all licensable products have been measured effectively (i.e. Oracle licences are traditionally purchased as Named User or Processor. Have you acquired this usage information?)
• Allocate available licences on a monthly basis to all licensable products
• Identify and rectify non-compliance issues
• Manage and report downgrades effectively
• Continue to review contract (i.e. Microsoft Enterprise Agreements) usage ensuring that it is still within the scope of the agreement
• Manage Client Access Licence (CAL) entitlement

So, if you still need to carry out the majority of the tasks listed above, you could do with an effective licence management tool - one that is not only comprehensive but also easy-to-use, intuitive and designed to manage, control and protect the full lifecycle of your licences.

As stated in ITIL SAM Best Practice Publication, licence management tools are potentially one of the most important tools in a SAM implementation ... it's easy to see why ...

LICENCE DASHBOARD™

As Europe's leading software licence management tool, Licence Dashboard facilitates and drives more Software Asset Management (SAM) programmes than any other application on today's market.
Licence Dashboard is an essential tool for any organisation looking to hone its licence management process. Without it, managing software assets becomes an arduous and resource intensive task, one which suppresses the savings you could be making.

With its easy-to-use interface, Licence Dashboard has all the built-in licence intelligence required to manage the full lifecycle of your software - including maintaining comprehensive usage inventories and having the ability to verify your organisation's compliance status at any time.

From a single view within Licence Dashboard, an Administrator can report exactly what your organisation is allowed to install, determine how many licences have been allocated, verify how many licences are still available and be alerted to any maintenance renewals which are due. This unique report enables you to manage day-to-day licensing chores without having to be a Software Licensing Expert. It also provides greater clarity – putting you in a better negotiating position and promoting more informed purchasing decisions.

Utilising Licence Dashboard will not only help you reduce operational costs by streamlining and controlling the software lifecycle, but it will also increase valuable IT resource availability and productivity. Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, estimates that organisations which implement a licence management tool could experience as much as a 30% reduction in cost per asset in the first year and continued savings of 5 to 10% annually over the next five years.

So, with cost reduction order of the day, there has never been a better time to implement a licence management tool and start realising the true benefits associated with the effective management of your software assets.

MAKING THE TRANSITION

For those organisations that have already made significant investments in other tools or those that are simply using cumbersome spreadsheets, we have made it simple for you to integrate or make the transition to the Licence Dashboard.

We have the functionality, for example, to import your existing spreadsheets into our inventory - or we can directly integrate with your existing systems. This, accompanied by in-built intelligence in Licence Dashboard, can make the transition painless and easy to complete. Once implemented, the ongoing management of licences is intuitive and fully automated.

FIND OUT MORE

Just as Sage made managing your business accounts simple, Licence Dashboard has now made licence management easy. So, if you are interested in finding out more about why your organisation needs a tool like Licence Dashboard, please don't hesitate to contact us on 0845 265 1265 or email info@phoenixs.co.uk

To view an online demo, visit http://www.phoenixs.co.uk/LD-Demo/

To request a free 60-day evaluation CD, visit http://www.phoenixs.co.uk/ld-eval