IT providers are restricting the ability of businesses to innovate, with many IT pros feeling that suppliers deliver poor value, especially on upgrades, a Cogeco Peer 1 survey reveals. A survey of 150 IT professionals has highlighted distrust of IT suppliers, with many IT professionals believing their IT provider has curbed their ability to use … Read more
SAP’s recent settlement with AB InBev has again put audits and licensing under the spotlight. We look at how to get the best value and avoid fines. As someone who follows the software licensing market and who is also partial to the odd pint of Stella Artois, I have been following the AB InBev versus SAP case … Read more
With the roll-out of GNU GPL 3.0 open source licensing, the industry is expecting discrepancies, and hopes an open discussion will help to debug it. Ten companies have made a public commitment to providing greater predictability to open source users under the new GPL (General Public Licence) v3.0 licensing. CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP and SUSE … Read more
There is no point in paying for something you never use – or worse, using the wrong licence. Doing the bare minimum for SAP licence management is not enough. Many licence reports seem to be based on the basic consideration that “one installation equals one licence”, and in the case of desktop, on-site software, this … Read more
A recent study suggested most SAP projects have a 50% chance of failure. The risk of having incorrect SAP licensing could be far higher. The implementation of SAP is a major IT initiative that has the potential to streamline business processes and make the organisation more efficient. But, as Computer Weekly previously reported, many projects fail … Read more
Cisco Enterprise agreements can provide long-term benefits and savings, but they must be scrutinized carefully case-by-case to see if they make sense. Cisco Enterprise Agreements (“EAs”) are becoming an increasingly popular vehicle for purchasing and consuming software products and services from Cisco. The general concept is that – rather than purchasing individual software products and associated … Read more
Open-source software is great, but proceed with caution. Done well, and with a properly thought-out strategy, it can be a powerful arsenal in your toolset. But done wrong, it can be a security risk and a giant waste of time, energy, and resources. Everyone, from developers all the way up to the C-suite, needs to understand the key concepts … Read more
Observing the enterprise software market today is like observing a major relationship crisis where one side is failing to listen to the other. It appears that suppliers are unrelentingly pushing their customers to move to the cloud. Their customers want to move to the cloud too, but not to rip and replace their perfectly functioning back-office systems … Read more
Wisegeek explains software licensing as a type of contract which exists between the person of company who produces a type of software, and the end user, or person who purchases or downloads the software to use. It is created to protect the copyright of the software, and actually restricts the ways in which the end user can … Read more
Software licensing is the often-neglected ‘annoying little sibling’ of IT management. Despite the potentially serious consequences of failing to ensure an organisation’s software estate is correctly licensed, it is often seen as a tick-box exercise – rather than a strategic management process. Today, as organisations look to transform their operations digitally, software licensing has never … Read more
