Avoid paying for
unused licenses through sound enterprise software license management processes and up-to-date licensing compliance on costs, usage and agreements.
Organisations can always buy more but if they over-purchase; they cannot get a refund for
unused licenses. In addition, enterprises are essentially buying on faith that they will derive sufficient ROI from the software to warrant the high initial outlay.
In a phone interview, Avante said PBB had 19
unused licenses which it would deploy this year, bringing the total network to 135.
The caps have also served to inflate the cost of licenses, as holders have engaged in roundabout and lucrative business deals to transfer licenses from one entity to the next, even though the law states that
unused licenses revert to the municipality or state.
SAP and other vendors are facing various pressures on their maintenance revenue streams, as customers look at third-party services and seek to "park"
unused licenses in order to stop paying maintenance on them.
Some of these providers are still seeking
unused licenses to lease.
"One of our reference customers, an equipment manufacturing company with 50,000 employees, observed a 6X ROI within 9 months, by reclaiming and repurposing
unused licenses," said John Juris, President, SCCM Expert.
The VMware View Rescue program targets customers unhappy with VMware's View technology by letting them trade up to 500
unused licenses for ones with VDI Suite and XenDesktop.<p>"(It's for) all customers who had a great experience with VMware in the server and then rushed right out to do the same thing with the desktop and ran into a brick wall," said Wes Wasson, chief marketing officer at Citrix.<p>But while there are indeed challenges when going from server to desktop virtualization, said Sloan, the issue is not specific to VMware, as Microsoft and Citrix suggest.
Without precise knowledge of license use, organisations risk duplicate or misclassified users and
unused licenses, which may unknowingly increase costs, the company claims.
But during the rest of the year, they're left with
unused licenses that waste money.
In addition, Johnson estimates the company has saved several thousand dollars in software licensing tees due to the ability to discover and harvest
unused licenses. The company also is able to forecast and budget for new equipment with the help of accurate, current data, rather than "guesstimates."