Championing the professional management of software
and protecting members rights

By Andy Ellwood: iQuate

iQuate has discovered discrepancies between accepted and actual Oracle deployment and usage information in every customer we have worked with, and our customers have used this accurate data to achieve greater levels of control in several key areas.

For example, a high profile UK government agency delivering public facing services outsourced its  IT operations to a large Systems Integrator. In order to ensure they were compliant, the SI employed a team of Oracle experts to perform a manual Oracle inventory count.

iQuate were engaged to verify the result of this audit using iQSonar. The tool was initially deployed in a test environment to satisfy the client that running the tool would have no detrimental impact on the performance or availability of key business critical applications.

Once deployed across the entire network, iQSonar discovered that the manual audit was incorrect. This discrepancy was caused by the SI having prepared a list of Options installed, rather than Options in use. Had this been reported to Oracle, the licence position would have been overstated to a list price value of £1.1m

In a separate example iQuate was engaged with a major international insurance services organisation. During the scanning process our team was told Oracle would not be discovered on Windows-based or Virtual servers because installation  of Oracle on Windows or Virtual environments were against company policy and the customer had strict processes and procedures in place that governed the installation of software.

Within the first day, iQSonar had discovered Oracle on Windows server and Virtualized Windows and Linux servers, despite management being assured only days previously that this was not the case.

iQSonar uncovered seven digit  licence savings for the customer, and also prompted a review of operational procedures that led to improved operational management and control.

iQSonar is the only third party tool verified by Oracle as providing accurate and definitive Oracle deployment and usage data.

The Software Industry Research Board (SIRB) has scheduled next year’s UK Software Management and Licensing Conference to take place on 21st April 2010 at the Madejski Stadium in Reading, Berkshire.

Invitations to the conference will be circulated via our e-bulletin service in January but in the meantime we are interested to know what topics you would like to see covered in the conference workshop sessions. To help us understand we’re inviting you to give us the answer to just 7 questions in our on-line survey. Your answers will enable us to design the content of the workshops to meet your needs and ensure that you gain maximum benefit and value from the conference.

Please click this link to access the survey www.surveymonkey.com/s/F5VWGH3. The survey will close on 24th December 2009, so please make sure we have your answers before then.