A software licencing spat between Siemens and VMware triggered by negotiations over renewals and a subsequent audit has turned into a full-fat legal battle. Two heavyweights going at it in court over software use is a spectacle, but so called “true-ups” in which an organisation reconciles its actual software usage with the licenses it has purchased are often negotiating opportunities for vendors, as Forrester recently noted.
That can regularly get messy…
“They can start with a request for a software audit but often then lead to finding unlicensed software… The intersection of infrastructure software, virtualization, and massive operational scale can mean large areas of unaccounted expense from true-ups where a business has no choice but to pay or disrupt the business” the research house wrote last month.
And Barry Pilling, principal consultant at bedigital, an independent IT consultancy and asset management specialist, told The Stack that Siemens was not alone: “We are seeing Broadcom auditing a lot of customers who haven't taken subscriptions at the expiry of their VMware ELA, instead preferring to rely on third-party support, which is considerably cheaper…”
Pilling noted that Broadcom recently introduced a mandatory compliance reporting clause into the license agreements for products, including its flagship VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation: “Customers will be obliged to share a license usage report with the vendor every 180 days or face losing functionality from the software.”
Software licensing: What CIOs need to know
Software licences are evolving fast. Beyond the shift from perpetual to subscription models, there are a number of significant changes to software licensing agreements that can impact long-term IT strategy and budget; CIOs and CTOs need to be increasingly mindful of the risk.
The Stack spoke with some leading licensing experts to solicit their views on the pitfalls that digital leaders need to be on top of in this climate. Here’s what you need to be alert to.
