Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Illinois)

In spite of the escalating intensity of the rhetoric surrounding the upcoming presidential elections, I do think there’s one thing we can all agree on no matter what our political leanings: the government should make every effort to cut wasteful spending.

Illinois congressman, Joe Walsh, has taken steps to root out waste within a relatively small, yet still significant, portion of the government’s budget: $40 billion in annual software spending. Congressman Walsh recognizes what companies in the private sector have known for a long time: that establishing some very simple software license management processes can help eliminate significant amounts of waste. According to Walsh, “There is a tremendous amount of waste currently institutionalized in the federal government’s current system (or lack thereof) in procuring and using software… Adopting best practices from the private sector around software asset management and license optimization is a painless and efficient way to eliminate this wasteful spending, while increasing the value being delivered to government employees.”

As such, Walsh has proposed a House amendment to the 2012 Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) authorization bill, which holds the department accountable for reigning in superfluous software spending. The amendment contains specific language requiring that the CIO:

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As most of our customers know, software usage analysis is a critical component of effective IT asset management, offering a means to analyze whether software investments are being fully utilized, ensure concurrently-licensed apps are being used within proper usage limits, and evaluate usage patterns of unauthorized applications within your environment.  This month, we’ll take a look at the “Software Usage Statistics” report, one of Express Software Manager’s most widely used reports, which provides valuable insight into application usage patterns within your organization. 

The Software Usage Statistics report, when filtered by license unit, helps you determine the percentage of any given application launched within a specifed time frame, as well as more granular details such as average amount of time used (or unused) per day.  These statistics provide clues as to which applications may be underutilized and represent opportunities for re-harvesting and/or renegotiating license agreements to better reflect actul usage.   In other situations, the report can be used to examine the prevalence of unauthorized, harmful, or “nuisance” applications within your organization.  To investigate further, you can click on any of the displayed license units to see usage patterns for each application on individual machines, and even sort that data based on usage to see which machines show the highest and/or lowest amount of activity.   

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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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For anyone planning to attend the IBSMA’s SAM Summit this June in Chicago, be sure not to miss Kris Barker’s (Express Metrix’s CEO) presentation on application recognition, entitled: “Software Identification: What You Need To Know.”

The focus of this year’s event is “mastering software license management“.  According to the event web site, attendees will “…learn what it takes to be the best at managing contracts, ensuring compliance and running the latest tools.”

Kris’ presentation ties perfectly into this year’s theme, in that it will address the critical role software identification plays in your software asset management efforts.  Topics will include: why accurate application recognition is so important, the existing methodologies for identifying apps(along with their pitfalls), the current state of software tagging, and the role technology plays in application recognition.

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