Why should a CEO, the Board, CFO, and CIO care about Software License Compliance and Risk Management?
If earnings are a priority, then un-necessary expense leakage and minimizing un-predictable and un-controlled financial risk should be as well. Software License Compliance and Risk Management, much like Supply Chain Management has the power to save an organization millions of dollars or literally bring it to its knees through catastrophic financial and legal liability identified by a software compliance audit. Let me explain.
Software vendors make their living off selling software. They do this in two fundamental ways. One is to sell you new software solutions, the other is to compel you to buy additional software as a result of true-up exercises each year or software compliance audits. One of the major global software vendors derives at least 35% of its yearly revenue from software compliance audits.
Many organizations “true” up and add un-necessary expense because they can’t accurately assess how many software licenses they actually have deployed across their desktops and servers. They can’t accurately assess this investment because they may not have the right governance and business processes, tools, software licensing knowledge, and people in place to do this heavy lifting. So they take educated guesses. And more often than not, they err on the side of caution, which means that the software vendor benefits-not the organization itself.
Virtualization and Cloud Services are fantastic alternatives for organizations. The only problem is, most organizations don’t have an intimate knowledge of how drastically their risk profile changes for the worse when software licenses transition into a virtualized and cloud environment. The reason for this is simple. The architects focused on reducing infrastructure costs don’t necessarily have the software licensing knowledge to go with those environments. We have seen clients with a modest investment in ERP software of a few million, create a financial risk of hundreds of millions of dollars, as a result of virtualization and/or the cloud.
The board and the senior management team assumes that their staff are diligently and accurately enumerating the risk, but more often than not, they don’t have all the pieces of Software License Compliance Risk Management to do this. More often than not, they don’t know what they don’t know. People make assumptions. Assumptions are ok if an organization doesn’t care about spending millions of dollars they don’t have to on true-up exercises, or worse if they think they can wriggle or negotiate out of a software compliance audit.
In the same way that Walmart reinvented supply chain management, Knowsys is reinventing Software License Compliance and Risk Management, which we call “SLiC” (Software License Compliance and Risk Management and Optimization). Knowsys provides:
- SLiC Management and Optimization business process, technology, and people best practices to grow your organization’s maturity and effectiveness;
- Risk Assessments to quickly enumerate risk with key investments and identify mitigation strategies that can be done before a Software Vendor Audit
- SLiC Audit Defense for any software vendor and products
- SLiC Software and SaaS Solutions (BCS)
- SLiC Managed Services and Outsourcing
- SLiC Proof of Concepts with respect to any of our products and services
What Makes Knowsys Different than Everyone Else in this Space?
- We don’t work for any software vendors or do audits on their behalf-ever!
- We bring global SLiC expertise which covers any software vendor/publisher/product
- We can provide you with BCS Software Organizer or SaaS if that’s what you need or
- We can provide you with a SLiC Managed Service and you don’t have to buy any software solution to achieve monthly compliance reporting on specific vendors on your desktop or server estate
- We can provide soup to nuts Business Process, Technology, and People Outsourcing for SLIC
- You can try our services through Proof of Concept/Value engagements designed to be quick, low-risk, cost, and high-value in that we always identify cost savings/avoidance or risk mitigation opportunities
- We offer better solutions and results than the “usual suspects”, but at a fraction of the cost our competitors would cost your organization
If you want to discuss how we can help you mitigate Software License Compliance Risk, please call Sherrie Farnum, Director of Professional and Managed Services, 647-224-8177 or email: [email protected]
