SOFTWARE LICENSING

Pace Harmon Reports Reveal Best Practices to Avoid Risks with Software Licensing Audits

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor

Pace Harmon (News - Alert), an outsourcing advisory services firm, recently released a complimentary pair of reports that delivers best practices to avoid risks with software licensing audits.

Enterprises with dynamic business environments and evolving infrastructure technologies find software license compliance a major challenge. As a result, they are experiencing an uptick in provider-driven software audits. 

When it comes to software licensing, it is just as likely that a software license is purchased for an installation when the company already has unapplied licenses it could draw from. This scenario can be avoided by designing optimization into software license compliance, according to experts.

With software providers relying on more frequent audits to ensure maximized license and maintenance revenue and earnings-per-share, enterprises with substantial software portfolios are suddenly facing multimillion dollar software compliance liabilities, says Jonathan Shaw, Ph.D., principal, Pace Harmon.

In this scenario, enterprises must adopt proactive strategies to combat software audit liabilities, according to Pace Harmon.

“To safeguard against this growing risk, enterprises must understand the complexity of maintaining software compliance, take protective measures at each stage of the software lifecycle, and establish proactive processes for maintaining compliance,” Shaw said in a statement.

Pace Harmon’s reports, “Software Compliance: Protecting the Enterprise from Audits,” are designed to help mitigate the impacts of software audits in enterprises. In the first report, Pace Harmon provides an analysis of the current state of license compliance, including compliance challenges, the trend of increasing audit frequency, the costs of non-compliance and out-of-compliance examples, as well as an overview of considerations around software compliance and audits.

The second report analyzes the considerations during software acquisition including selecting the correct licensing structure, broadening and retaining license use rights and mitigating audit risk.

Additionally, the second report shares considerations for maintaining compliance, including following Software Asset Management (SAM) processes, seeking automated support for SAM and assuming a proactive stance with providers. The report also explains the best practices for managing a software audit, ranging from audit preparation and aggressively managing the audit process to treating settlement as a negotiation.