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How to eliminate the complexity of software licensing with utility pricing.

Article Excerpt
Software licensing seems to grow more and more complex every year, and as software piracy mushrooms, software companies and watchdog groups are aggressively pursuing violators with fines and lawsuits. This presents a unique challenge for IT managers who already expend countless hours and dollars to ensure compliance with increasingly complex licensing schemes. Fortunately, solutions such as software utility pricing and data volume-based pricing may help solve the problem.

Current Software Licensing

IT managers must try to manage the increasingly complex software licensing landscape while simultaneously reducing their cost structure. In order to develop a successful licensing plan that reduces costs, improves service levels and eliminates non-compliance risks, IT must negotiate a tricky process:

Baseline Licenses. They must identify hundreds or thousands of software licenses (including various versions, upgrades and patches) from multiple sources for individuals, departments, business units, branches and worldwide locations.

Track Changes. They must understand the licensing consequences of hardware changes such as adding, eliminating and/or consolidating servers, clients and tape drives.

Prepare for Audits. They must prepare for inevitable software license audits from internal auditors, software vendors, the government, etc., and prove they are in compliance with all licenses.

Traditional Software Licensing Schemes

All too often IT deals with a confusing system of inconsistent licensing pricing schemes. It is...

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