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.

Gartner reports strong rise in software audits

September 11th, 2009 by Matt Fisher

According to a recent report from Gartner (”Gartner Polls & Surveys Show an Increase in Software License Audits”, 31 July 2009), more than 50 percent of organizations it talked to say they have been audited by at least one software vendor in the last 12 months. In research undertaken between February and June 2009, 56 percent of respondents said they had been audited, compared with 30-35 percent for the same study in 2008.

When filtering the results to show only EMEA-based organizations, the result is even higher, with 63 percent of respondents reporting at least one audit request.

According to a variety of sources from both the software vendor and Software Asset Management (SAM) communities, the overall rise in audits is largely not due to an increased level of activity from vendors that already had active compliance programs in place, but instead due to a number of other vendors introducing compliance programs for the first time.

While Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM were cited as the most ‘prolific’ auditors, survey respondents also reported audit requests from no fewer than 18 other software vendors, including BMC, CA, HP, SAP and Symantec.

As the report states, “On-site audits aren’t pleasant”, and Gartner strongly advises that end user organizations adopt Software Asset Management and License Management practices and technologies well in advance of any audit, so that the company is better prepared to react in a timely fashion and without causing major disruption to normal business activities.