Review Licenses Ahead of Year-End Renewals

It’s three months until the end of 2019 and many companies have software licenses due for true-up or support agreement renewal due by the end of the quarter. Many may also have subscriptions that need to be reviewed, too. Now, therefore, is a great time to collect up all the agreements and licenses due in the next three months and to start evaluating your options. 

• The first question is whether you still need the software, or will still need it by the end of the year – if not, it’s time to make sure retirement plans are on track and you issue a non-renewal letter with the appropriate notice in accordance with your agreement. 
• If you need less of the product, now is the time to figure out what you need to do to reduce future costs – you don’t want software hanging around installed but unused on miscellaneous servers. 
• If you need to up your volumes now or for next year, consider how and when you can best leverage the additional commitment to negotiate better pricing or other benefits. 

And last but not least, it’s time to review your effective license position. Do you have enough licenses to cover your actual usage? Have you excluded items that don’t require licenses? Have you applied licenses correctly based on the agreed terms and metrics? Have you accounted for changes in the infrastructure that impact licenses (number of server sockets, cores, cpu factors, server clustering, etc.) that might have slipped by unnoticed during the year? Do you have corporate acquisitions whose licensing needs to be consolidated in a master agreement? 

This may sound like a great deal of work, and it truly is for those organizations that do not have a permanent SAM or ITAM function. If this is your situation you will likely need to be selective in your approach – use a risk-weighted analysis to decide which vendors and products to look at first and the level of resources to devote to each given the individuals you have available and the calendar. 

My prior post - “When are you most at risk for being audited for license compliance by a software publisher?” includes a calendar showing the fiscal year-ends of major software publishers, which often coincide with contract renewal and true-up dates. 

#sam #itam #itamsamslc #itassetmanagement #softwareassetmanagement #licensemanagement #itamreview

Marcus Hand is Principal at Handmarc LLC which he started to assist companies to meet challenges in IT vendor management and software licensing such as negotiating enterprise license agreements, managing true-ups, and responding to software compliance audits. Marcus is a Microsoft Certified Professional in the area of Software Asset Management (SAM - Core) and a Certified ScrumMaster. Before starting Handmarc, Marcus was Director of IT Vendor Management where he negotiated a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, two mid-term contract modifications, and several true-ups. He also negotiated an enterprise agreement with Adobe and similar agreements with other software publishers, managed several true-ups, negotiated a large IT managed services (ITSM) agreement, and managed the company’s response to a number of license compliance audits.