The ticking time bomb “There’s a software license time bomb armed, ticking, and buried deep in the foundations of many a Global 200 firm’s elegant IT architecture.” Defuse Software License Time Bombs with Software Asset Management, Forrester, July 9 2010 1
As large firms rely more and more heavily on software applications to manage even the most mundane parts of their business, they face a daily challenge. Defusing the ticking time bomb in their midst - one that could explode at any moment when they are audited by a software vendor. With the number of audits from software vendors on the rise, many organizations have come to believe that buying their way out of trouble is often the safest solution. 61% of Software Asset Managers, surveyed in recent research conducted on behalf of 1E by Opinion Matters, said that compliance and reducing business risk are their main drivers.2 On the face of it, over licensing on software that is critical to your business may seem like a sensible option, especially when the alternative could be heavy fines, substantial back-charges and legal action - not to mention potentially damaging press coverage. By focusing entirely on compliance, more and more organizations in the US and UK are accepting that they will need to spend ever increasing sums paying for software. The problem comes when we consider that much of that software is destined to be configured and deployed to every users’ machine, but then remain there evermore, forgotten and unused. This is an enormous waste of money. Nearly two thirds of organizations polled by Opinion Matters suspected that they had unused software on their machines.2 Even more worryingly, over one third of those organizations admitted that they had no way to quantify the problem.2 These figures are supported by research conducted on behalf of 1E by Vanson Bourne in 2010 that suggested that nearly three quarters of users believe they have unused software on their PCs.3 So every year you buy more and more licenses and incur higher and higher maintenance costs just in case a vendor wants to conduct an audit, but now you’re buying them for software you’re not even using. So what about the cost of all that unused software? 88% of the license managers in those organizations surveyed by Opinion Matters estimated that it was more than $100 per PC, with one quarter estimating that it could be as high as $999 per PC.2
© 1E 2011
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