During these exceptional circumstances that we are all facing, most companies and their employees need to adapt to a different way of working in order to execute all necessary activities.
TIP #37 - March 2020:What needs to be addressed right away in order to prevent inconvenient discussions with the supplying software publishers now or later in time?
While working from your home office used to be the exception instead of the rule, this situation has now been turned around completely. When you are able to work from your home office, you will do so and luckily we are adapting to this situation in massive numbers!
In order to cope with this massively increased demand, server capacity has been up-scaled, network bandwidth has been increased and additional software has been deployed in order to deal with the circumstances and enable employees to manage their daily routines. However, these necessary and very contributing measures require a closer look at the license entitlements as well. What needs to be addressed right away in order to prevent inconvenient discussions with the supplying Publishers now or later in time?
- Prevent a bottleneck. Make sure the capacity of your concurrent or floating licenses fits your needs in time. For these licenses a payment is being done for the maximum number of users that is using the product at the same time. During the contract negotiations however, any calculated numbers would have been based on a small percentage of employees. Since the demand has suddenly increased, any additional users could be blocked from accessing or using the software. Consider software that facilitates virtual environments or access to certain domains or environments. Citrix would be a perfect example in this case.
- Be prepared for increasing software expenses when processor capacity is being extended for your server environment, either in-house or located at service provider(s) you contracted. The speed in which changes take place in order to adapt to the situation makes it a real challenge for ITAM teams to keep track of. Impact on licensing might be overlooked easily and additional costs might not be taken into account. This situation corresponds mostly to licenses with a processor-, CPU- or core-based metric. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle all fit the picture very well and costs may increase rapidly if not keeping track of all the changes.
Whatever measures need to be taken by using the fast lane, all - probably temporary - measures need to be reversed as well when the time is right. Another reason to keep track of your entitlements and manage all the changes related to ITAM correctly.