Software License Management

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Software License Management

White Paper

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Altiris, Inc. is a pioneer of IT lifecycle management software that allows IT organizations to easily manage desktops, notebooks, thin clients, handhelds, industry-standard servers, and heterogeneous software including Windows, Linux and UNIX. Altiris automates and simplifies IT projects throughout the life of an asset to reduce the cost and complexity of management. Altiris client and mobile, server, and asset management solutions natively integrate via a common Web-based console and repository. For more information, visit www.altiris.com.

NOTICE

The content in this document represen ts the cu rrent vie w of Altiris as of the date of publication. Because Altiris responds continually to chan gin g ma rket conditions, th is document should n ot be interp reted a s a commitment on the part of Altiris. Altiris cannot gua ra ntee the accura cy of any information presented after the date of publication .

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Introduction... 1

Looking for a quick win? Optimize your software license environment. 1

Software License Audit Preparation 1

Optimize Software Investments through Reallocation 1

Consolidate Vendor Contracts 1

Reduce Support Costs 2

Justify Software Investments 2

Infrastructure Resilience and Security 2

Implementing Software Asset Management Processes ... 3

Phase I: Making Asset Management Part of the Culture 3

Phase II: The Software Audit 4

What software do I have? 4

CIO Magazine 4

Phase III: Gather the licenses 4

How many licenses have I purchased? 4

Phase IV: Software Usage 5

How many applications am I actually using? 5

Quick Facts 5

Phase V: Understanding the Data 6

How many do I really need? 6

The Solution ... 7

Altiris® Asset Management Suite™ 7

Benefits 7

System Requirements 9

Notification Server Minimum Requirements 9 Try Asset Management Suite Free for 30 Days 9

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www.altiris.com Software License Management > 1

Looking for a quick win? Optimize your software license environment.

Implementing Software Asset Management processes allows you to capitalize on software license reallocation opportunities, achieve volume licensing discounts, decrease software support costs, increase

infrastructure security and resilience, justify future purchasing activities, and ensure license agreement compliance.

Software License Audit Preparation

Practicing internal software audits on a quarterly basis helps you gain control of software inventories and ensures preparedness for software license audits. If by chance the Business Software Alliance (BSA) or other license enforcement agencies knock on your door requesting compliance metrics, you must be able to confidently supply data suggesting your compliance. The implementation of software asset management processes ensures detailed knowledge of which applications are installed across the network and their associated licenses, compared to the number of purchased licenses within your license agreements. The ability to quickly supply supporting compliance information allows you to quickly fulfill the enforcement agency’s

requirements and get back to your normal work functions, minimizing the impact of the audit.

Optimize Software Investments through Reallocation

Knowing how many licenses are stated in the license agreement and how those licenses are being used can save you money. Correlating license agreement details with the number of installed applications to the number of licenses being used in “n” time frame helps you to determine which users do not require specific applications. Harvesting licenses allows you to reallocate licenses to “needy” users and eliminates the need to purchase new licenses to fulfill software requests. Practicing reallocation procedures helps you to optimize current investments and budget future license purchases, eliminating over/underbuying.

Consolidate Vendor Contracts

Organizations have either grown through acquisition, consolidated or practiced ad hoc purchasing by business units. As a result, most

organizations have multiple contracts containing similar applications from a single vendor. The implementation of software asset management processes provides visibility into your software license agreements to determine contract redundancies. This information presents opportunities for you to work with your software vendors to gain access to volume licensing discounts by consolidating contracts, further decreasing licensing and maintenance costs.

INTRODUCTION

Implementing Software Asset Management

processes allows you to capitalize on software license reallocation opportunities, achieve volume licensing discounts, decrease software support costs, increase infrastructure security and resilience, justify future purchasing activities, and ensure license agreement compliance.

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Reduce Support Costs

The lack of standardization of operating systems and hardware leads to a complex environment that is near impossible to manage and is costly to support. An environment with multiple versions of operating systems and hardware leads to a lack of standardization of application versions. Gaining visibility into OS and hardware versions and allows you to better understand what areas to focus on to ensure consistency across your organization, ultimately increasing manageability and reducing affiliated software support costs.

Justify Software Investments

IT organizations are continually faced with prioritizing technology purchases. In many cases, IT organizations do not have adequate

information to execute informed purchasing decisions. Understanding the number of purchased licenses within the license agreement, what

licenses are being used or not being used, and how much the licenses cost provides you with the information you need to forecast software budgets, further helping to justify future software purchases and eliminate risky overbuying and underbuying.

Infrastructure Resilience and Security

The downloading of unauthorized and pirated applications creates security vulnerabilities and can lead to legal implications. The ideal situation would be to empower IT representatives to monitor and set policies to eliminate the introduction of unauthorized applications into your environment by automatically denying installation and allowing the removal of specified applications.

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Phase I: Making Asset Management Part of the Culture

The first step is always the hardest. A software management program should be part of an overall asset management initiative in your company.

The purpose of asset management is twofold. Asset management is first a set of processes that helps IT organizations achieve business

objectives by providing detailed information about configuration, relationships, and associated costs. The assets must be displayed by location, cost center (accounting unit) or employees to ensure

businesses make decisions targeted at controlling costs. Asset management is a vehicle for facilitating growth or contraction in the enterprise, while minimizing inherent risks. Asset management provides tools that:

• Align purchasing/IT operations with business goals and objectives.

• Ramp up for new hires

o What type of computer do they receive? o How is it configured?

o Do we have that in stock? o Manage hardware refresh • Times of contraction

o What assets can we reallocate? o Where are the assets?

o What is the value of assets for write-off or sale? o Stop walking assets with former employees

• Disappearing assets such as notebooks and PDAs. (What is the cost of the asset and more importantly the information on the device?)

• Help ever-tightening margins; your competitors' expenses are less.

• Optimize current investments through reallocation.

The initial step is to discover and inventory what is in the enterprise. This is then followed by extending the details of the inventory with such information as financial data, user information, and so on.

IMPLEMENTING SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

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Phase II: The Software Audit

What software do I have?

A complete hardware and software inventory adds many values to your business. Primarily it answers the question: What do I have? It then extends to give visibility into what potential hardware upgrade scenarios we might have. Some additional features are mitigating security risks, preparing for migration (and knowing what can be migrated), what software needs to be upgraded and helps set standards in the

enterprise. This leads to the reduction of maverick buying. The ultimate result is reducing support costs by reducing the number of

hardware/software platforms to be supported.

The first step is getting control of what has been installed in your enterprise. An inventory of your desktops, notebooks, servers,

handhelds, and network devices gets control of what do I have. This will give you visibility into the number of licenses that you are using. Data inventory needs to be fully configurable, manageable, and reported in several ways. This gives you the flexibility to scan for only specific pieces of software or to scan for everything.

End-user information needs to be collected as part of the inventory process. This data is essential for understanding who owns specific computers. This allows administrators to associate software licensing and usage data with the location and contact information.

CIO Magazine

Quan Ha, manager of desktop support at Sony Pictures Digital, also lends his voice to the chorus, saying that his investment (in software auditing tools) provided near-instant payback by revealing that an anticipated $10,000 software purchase was unnecessary because the company already owned more licenses than it needed.

Phase III: Gather the licenses

How many licenses have I purchased?

The ability to track purchase information for licenses is very difficult when held by a number of different individuals. It is essential to establish standards for purchasing and introducing software into the environment. Not only does this provide insight into what we have, it also helps enforce standards so that un-authorized software is not purchased and introduced into the environment.

The first step of understanding what has been purchased is to assign a person or group of people to gather the licenses. These licenses will be

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www.altiris.com Software License Management > 5 found in your accounting or purchasing department, IT department, or a myriad of other places. Many organizations will need to contact vendors and other sources to gather this information. Once the information is gathered and entered into a centralized license management system, you can gain insight into what you have and how much you paid for specific licenses. This exercise provides opportunities to analyze license agreements for redundancies.

Phase IV: Software Usage

How many applications am I actually using?

The software inventory scan determines how many copies of an application are installed on your user’s systems, the software usage information determines which of these software applications are actually being used, and how often.

Software metering tools can also help with asset management by

tracking usage patterns and reporting on trends to assist with server load balancing. These tools can also monitor and control the use of

unauthorized applications such as video games and screen savers and prevent downloading of insecure, non-approved software.

Without usage data, enterprises may be purchasing software based on perceived requirements, not factual need. Usage data plays a role in determining which applications should be included in a standard image and how many standard images may be needed to meet the software requirements of users.

Enterprises that conduct image testing and evaluation in short time frames are most receptive to implementing software usage capabilities. This correlation of information can provide dramatic cost savings as IT reclaims software licenses that are not being used. For example:

• Relocate surplus licenses to internal cost centers that need additional licenses

• List excess licenses that do not need to be renewed for the coming year

• Reduce costs of maintaining license compliance

• Identify and eliminate software applications that are not being used

Quick Facts

• Gartner estimates that 20 to 25 percent of all software ends up as shelfware.

• ZDnet: Typically, 10 to 20 percent of the cost of enterprise software goes to periodic bills for upgrades and tech support.

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You'd be surprised how many companies keep paying those fees even when they're not using the software.

Phase V: Understanding the Data

How many do I really need?

Once you know what software you have, how often users are using it, and how many your organization has purchased, you have the

information you need to make informed business decisions. The

correlation of this data must be automatic and “active.” This means that it is continually tracked and makes alerts to the appropriate managers when the business falls out of compliance or is overbuying licenses and wasting money. Having control of software licenses in your environment reduces the risk of expensive penalties and legal exposure. Normal style should be used for main body copy.

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Altiris® Asset Management Suite™

Asset Management Suite™ captures detailed software inventory of installed applications across the network, and tracks usage data for each Windows* application. The suite alerts IT staff when application

installations exceed the number of purchased licenses. The correlation of software usage and inventory data with software licensing contracts provides dramatic cost savings to IT organizations.

Asset Management Suite includes powerful Web publishing features that turn your browser into an executive information system. Altiris’ pre-packaged Web Reports™, which are available from any Web browser, support presentation-quality graphs, tables, and Office 2000/XP pivot tables. Use the drill-down feature to offer multiple levels of details in your report, while run-time replaceable filters and parameters allow for extensive, ad-hoc customization. To ensure that data remains secure, you can use Custom Views to control access to all reports.

Benefits

Why pay more than you need to? Asset Management Suite helps you: • Identify software usage patterns

• Stop overbuying and underbuying trends • Facilitate license distribution

• Identify non-standard applications

• Stop usage of unauthorized applications by time/group • Remove or true-up on unauthorized software installations • Standardize the application environment

• Reduce support costs

• Take advantage of volume licensing discounts

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Figure 1

Software license contracts and expiration dates are easy to track with Altiris Asset

Management Suite.

Figure 2 Altiris Asset Management Suite keeps you informed of license usage and whether you need to uninstall licenses to maintain compliance.

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System Requirements

Asset Management Suite requires that you install and configure the Altiris Notification Server™.

Notification Server Minimum Requirements

Note: As you add solutions, we recommend that you increase processor speed, RAM, and hard drive space.

• Processor—Pentium* lll 800 class or faster • Memory—1 GB RAM

• Hard drive—20 GB

• Operating system—Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Server SP2 or later

• Database—Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3 restricted to less than 50 percent of available memory. Note: MSDE 2000 recommended for evaluation purposes only.

• Browser—Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later

Try Asset Management Suite Free for 30 Days

Get your 30-day, fully-functional evaluation copy of Asset Management Suite at www.altiris.com.