Can you be out of compliance with an Unlimited License Agreement?
by: Randy Littleson, Flexera
Is it possible to be out of compliance with an all-you-can-eat software license agreement?
The answer to this question is a definitive “yes”, but I don’t think most people realise this. Depending on which vendor you’re working with, such agreements are referred to as Enterprise License Agreements (ELA), Unlimited License Agreements (ULA) or any other number of terms. They essentially work the same way, it’s a form of “all-you-can-eat” license for an enterprise. So, if that’s the goal, how is it possible to be out of compliance if you have such an agreement with SAP, Oracle or your vendor of choice?
In many cases there are variants to these agreements. For example, some have no cap (you specify which products are covered and then you can use them with no limit) and some are capped (you agree on the number of servers you will install, for example). If you have a no cap agreement you can run afoul when the organisation assumes that all products are covered under the agreement and starts to deploy broadly a product not included in the agreement. If you have a capped agreement, it’s quite common for an organisation to over-deploy beyond their agreed upon cap.
I’ve heard/seen statistics predicting that as many as 90% of all customers have software compliance issues (and the bigger you are, the more likely you have software compliance issues). While the number of customers with enterprise or unlimited license agreements is a relative small percentage of the total market, my experience indicates that they too are in this 90% category.
