Happy New Year!

If you’re anything like me, the first weeks of January usually involve a Herculean effort to work off the extra pounds you packed on as a result of all the holiday excess.  But this task is dwarfed in comparison to the effort your company may face as a result of the past decade’s technology excesses:  blind overpurchasing of applications, lax software usage policies, unfettered adoption of new enterprise and consumer technologies, and a pervasive “Wild West” attitude toward responsible licensing practices.  All these have led to a glut of shelfware, institutionalized overspending, and unprecedented software piracy risk among many organizations–leaving IT departments with a colossal mess to clean up.

Related to all this, I thought I’d post a timely and well-written article about the ever-evolving pitfalls related to software licensing, written by Dan Tynan of InfoWorld. The column is a good primer on software license management, especially for those looking to get a handle on their license position. (Our own Kris Barker was tapped by Dan to lend his expertise about driving down application and support costs by metering software usage, along with navigating the licensing landmines associated with virtualized systems and software.)

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Any software vendor that’s been paying attention to its customers in recent months will tell you that software licensing preferences are changing–and quickly.  The past year, in particular, has brought about an appetite for more flexible licensing models that are less user-centric and more usage-centric.  As IT organizations continue to chisel away unnecessary spending and take a more strategic approach to software asset management, they’re increasingly demanding “pay-per-use” (i.e. usage-based licensing) and “pay as you go” (i.e. subscription-based licensing) scenarios that are more directly correlated with the benefits received through the use of any given application. And vendors are listening.  

According to a Computerworld article by Eric Lai, vendors are rapidly adjusting their license offerings to accommodate and take advantage of this shift. The article notes that 43% of vendors have changed or expanded their licensing options to include such approaches as usage-based and subscription-based pricing.  (Subscription pricing, which has long dominated the SaaS market, is now becoming commonplace among on-premise offerings). And, according to IDC, these trends are only expected to accelerate. 

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I recently attended the 2009 IAITAM Annual Conference, Las Vegas style. And although I’m sure everyone was equally tired of the “What happens in Vegas …” response to just about any statement that could be taken two ways, the conference as a whole was great. It’s an event that impresses me more every year: solid attendance (even in today’s challenging economy), an increasingly well-educated technical community regarding overall IT asset management practices, a growing understanding of the value of ITAM beyond just compliance, and a really great venue for vendors, service providers, practitioners, and end users to get together to share their experiences.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Bringing Green Together” which provided a background not only for the environmentally “green” areas such as reuse and disposal, but also the financial “green” realized by being ITAM-efficient, both with respect to purchasing assets and how efficiently those assets are utilized. There were over three dozen presentations on everything from vendor management to tools to internal evangelism, along with a number of end-user and ITAM practitioner case studies. There were also several opportunities to get current on the state of the ISO ITAM standards (the 19770 series). An update on the “-2″ tagging standard (which became official just a couple of weeks ago) was presented by Steven Klos, and the “-3″ entitlements group (led by John Tomeny) used the conference as an opportunity to convene its members and keep plugging away at it.

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