Effective Software Licence Purchasing

Many organisations unknowingly overspend on software licenses and maintenance. This is typically a result of organisations struggling to understand and manage complex licensing and pricing models, across multiple vendors. Technology changes also complicate licensing and are difficult to predict. For example, the growing popularity of virtualisation and increasing employee mobility mean IT departments are under further pressure to keep up to date with the different types of software licensing and patterns of usage.

Often organisations don’t purchase their software centrally or have effective purchasing policies and procedures that are enforced across the organisation. Consequently it can make it very difficult to accurately define what software they are running, how much they have paid for it, who and how it is used and, in fact, if it is ever used at all.

This lack of visibility of licenses has significant implications on software purchasing decisions. Some organisations, in order to contain software costs, may purchase too few licences, leading to users not having access to the applications they need or using them without a licence. Other organisations may overcompensate and buy extra licences which they don't need to make sure they are covered. All this can lead to unnecessary support and software update fees.

The pages linked below are intended to provide some ideas and guidance on what to do to help improve your software licence decision making processes.

SAM Optimisation Model (SOM)

Software Copyright

What is SAM?

Being compliant

SAE

FAST IiS members include Software Asset Management (SAM) practitioners, software publishers, software tools vendors, resellers, distributors, legal firms and professional consultants, to find out more about them visit our ‘List of Members’ page or send an enquiry to info@fastiis.org.