The following blog post, written by Mari Petersen (Express Metrix Director of Business Development), is in reference to the Software Identification Summit, which was held in Washington D.C. on May4th.  Two Express Metrix executives, Mari Petersen (Director of Business Development) and Kris Barker (Co-Founder & CEO) attended the conference.  According to TagVault, the event sponsor, “The software identification summit is designed to provide a forum for all software ecosystem members to discuss the future of software identification and discuss how these issues can be addressed in an authoritative fashion today with existing tools and technology.”

Kudos to Steve Klos for organizing a terrific conference last week!  I was especially impressed by the diversity of attendees: software publishers, tool providers, government agencies, SAM practitioners and other industry experts.  Each presentation was interesting in its own right, and on the whole, the sessions offered a variety of perspectives that complimented and reinforced one another.   

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An article caught my eye this morning in Manufacturing Business Daily summarizing the results of a recent Ernst & Young survey that focused on software asset management philosophies and practices among software vendors and their customers.  

Before discussing the results, I should point out that I’m pretty skeptical about studies conducted and published by firms with a commercial interest in the topic being explored.  Because Ernst & Young dedicates part of its business to IT governance, internal auditing, and compliance services for large enterprises, it’s virtually impossible for the firm to be objective in its research methodology or interpretation of results–in fact, they offered no information about their approach to the survey.  (For example, is there inherent bias among those selected to participate?  What were the roles with respect to compliance of those individuals or teams that actually completed the survey?  Why did they recruit end-user organizations that averaged over 10,000 desktops [organizations of this size comprise only 0.1 percent of all US companies over 100 employees]?  Is it possible to draw conclusions relevant to the marketplace with so few participants?  The list goes on and on.)

Nevertheless, the results are interesting and at least on the surface validate what we’ve long suspected to be the true motives behind vendor audits; software publishers are far more interested in revenue generation than they are in protecting their intellectual property or helping customers be successful in managing their software estates.  Only four of the eight “major” software publishers surveyed stated that protection of intellectual property rights is an objective of their compliance programs, flying directly in the face of the very legal platform software vendors and the BSA claim as the basis of their actions.  It’s also ironic that only 38% of vendors suggested that their compliance programs, which are generally advertised as “SAM” programs, have customer education and/or process improvement as a stated goal. 

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The following bylined article can also be found in the April issue of IAITAM’s ITAK Magazine and the April edition of FAST IiS Kaleidoscope.

Since the dawn of the desktop era, IT departments have struggled to keep track of software installed across their corporate networks.  Accurate software inventories are crucial to ensuring installed applications are properly licensed, understanding whether or not they’re being used, and budgeting for future software purchases.  Unfortunately, no standard methodology exists across applications and manufacturers for correlating installed program executables with actual application titles.  This leaves asset managers and the software discovery tools they utilize with any number of half-complete approaches to application recognition.

Driven by licensing challenges stemming from inaccurate and incomplete software identification, the ISO/IEC 19770-2 software tagging standard has been developed, providing publishers with guidelines for “tagging” their applications in a standard way that makes identification straightforward, automated, and virtually foolproof for discovery tools.  Yet despite the technical ease with which software tags can be implemented, publishers have been painfully slow to adopt the standard, and end users have not pressed vendors hard enough to spur them to action. 

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When asked about our company’s products, most people immediately think of Express Software Manager^®, our flagship product offered to businesses for IT asset inventory, software usage, and license reporting.  What many (including our long-standing customers) don’t realize is that we also separately license our software catalog, one of the key components of Express Software Manager, to a very different “customer”—asset management vendors themselves. 

Today we are proud to add Numara Software to a growing list of OEM partners, which includes IBM, LANDesk, New Boundary, BMC, and Amando Software.   The Express Software Identification Database (ESID)^® will power the software recognition for Numara’s Asset Management Platform, strengthening the accuracy and reliability of its existing capabilities such as asset inventory, software deployment, patch management, and license tracking.  Read the press release here.

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Just a quick note to get word out that the window of opportunity for providing feedback on the ISO/IEC 19770-1 revisions will close on the first of March.

Much discussion has circulated the ITAM media and blogosphere regarding the goals and substance of the ISO/IEC 19770-1 SAM Standard, as well as the opportunity to provide feedback on the draft of its four-tiered approach to SAM processes released last November.  For background on the topic see the press release issued by the SAM Standards Working Group. 

The survey itself can be accessed here:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7PX8RX5