1. Be very clear about the vendor agreement terms and penalties
- Gather all signed agreements
- Review language for each purchased product along with all associated agreements
- Understand compliance audit rights and procedures
- Be clear about the remedy and cost of compliance resolution
- Institutionalize the process for purchasing and deploying products to assure that the agreement terms are met
- Work with vendor to consolidate agreements where advantageous
- Identify any auto renewal or other triggered contract language
- Review cancelation language
- Research any related agreement language on the vendor website
2. Determine the type and quantity of licenses you own
- Gather all purchase history for all owned entities
- Be clear on upgrade rights and path
- Look for ownership that might have been forfeited or transferred
- Be aware of any geographic restrictions
- Know when and where the purchase was finalized
- Interview individuals who initiated the purchase when possible to understand the background
- Review budget and purchase justification documentation
3. Know your software deployment footprint
- Map all equipment and software on your network and in storage using discovery and inventory tools
- Review equipment and software that has been removed from service
- Develop a consolidated and reconciled Enterprise License Position (ELP)
- Analyze deployment patterns including upgrades and adoption patterns
- Examine active and planned technology implementation projects to assess footprint impact
- Explore technology utilization metrics
- Understand configuration standards and governance
- Identify cross platform licensing implications
- Review cross geography deployment
- Analyze support, incident logs and maintenance history
- Interview key stakeholders involved in the purchase and deployment processes
4. Understand your product use rights and risk
- Map the key guidelines and triggers from all EULAs active at the time of product purchase, as well as, changes to the agreements to the present time
- Dig deep into rules around environments that are shared, hosted, virtualized and otherwise different than traditional internal physical server installations
- Pay extra attention to mobility rights as they vary by product version and are restrictive if you do not have active maintenance in place
- Be clear about upgrade rights for each and every implementation
- Review the detailed change history for each environment with an eye toward triggers that could alter compliance
- Critically study agreement clauses that address acquisitions, divestitures, consolidations, and company growth
- Be aware of VAR and vendor product strategies that are hidden away in the agreement language as they are often incompatible with your needs
- Look for language with triggers requiring purchases, where licenses would be canceled, automatic contract renewal process is launched, or audits are required
- As you study the agreements be aware that they are often intentionally written to be unclear and that changes are made often without notice
- Review all internal governance regarding software license allocation as inconsistency can lead to compliance gaps
- Interview key stakeholders to assess governance consistency and to understand why implementation choices were made
- Your risk increases for every unknown attribute you uncover during your compliance review
5. Engage experts to assist as required
- Complex and changing vendor rules require expert focus and deep understanding of licensing models and strategic alternatives
- Without guidance well-intentioned technicians make choices with knowing licensing pitfalls resulting in unplanned and perhaps unnecessary spend
- Compartmentalized teams typically make decisions without knowing the total footprint, ELP, or EULA requirements – and don’t have the time or expertise necessary to optimize choices
- Experts use proprietary and industry tools to create a data lake of relevant information for detailed analysis
- Industry, vendor, and product expertise enables decisions based on an extensive knowledge base
- A focused team who analyses compliance on a daily basis for many clients and vendors is able to provide guidance with more confidence than an internal team who has infrequent exposure
6. Optimize license allocation
- Document your baseline using the footprint and ELP information
- Model financial models for each licensing model and hardware configuration
- Verify viability of each model with subject matter experts
- Determine the project cost and effort associated with the technology environment transformation
- Launch a process to collect and reuse licenses as the environment changes
- Implement the selected options for licensing models and hardware configurations
- Establish a process to regularly monitor licensing and hardware configurations to assure continued optimization
- Use experts to keep up to date on changes made by vendors that open new opportunity or introduce new risk
7. Purchase necessary licensing to achieve compliance
- Document the pending purchase including details regarding why each choice was made
- The knowledge and data that has been uncovered in this process will improve your negotiation position with the vendor
- Complete the purchasing process and follow-up with the key stakeholders to assure that the implementation follows the plan for the purchased licensing
8. Implement process to maintain compliance
- Refine governance and reintroduce the compliance process to the key stakeholders
- Build a data lake of the information provided by discovery tools, inventory systems, and purchasing processes so that routine analysis is available
- Conduct formal scheduled internal compliance audits and review observations and resolution with key stakeholders
