Software Audit Support

More than half of the top 100 software publishers have dedicated license compliance programmes that routinely audit their customers. These programmes have been put in place to protect the publisher’s legitimate interests as they are licensing out their intellectual property. However, many of these software license audits are driven by revenue pressures and can impact on your business. 

Software license audit programmes are executed by the publisher’s internal team or they’re managed by third-parties such as resellers or international accountancy firms. What we’ve found with many of our clients is that, instead of deploying more licenses than they’ve purchased and actively defrauding the publisher, most are caught unawares. Their software license audit has revealed an unintentional violation of license terms.    

Popular license terms such as CPU virtualisation, indirect access or user privilege restriction can create contractual license liabilities that are tens to hundreds of times higher than the actual license demand. This exposes businesses to substantial financial claims that are difficult to defend. This is where we come in…  

Our team is made up of people who worked for the Big Four publishers or audit firms which means that they understand exactly what you need to defend from audits and what to expect from a software license audit. We’ve developed a suite of commercial and technical methodologies that are designed to minimise your financial exposure if you’re under an active audit threat. 

We are one of only a few specialised consulting teams, globally, that can deliver a full lifecycle software license audit defence against Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle and Tier 2 software vendors. We help you to defend from audits by advising you throughout the vendor software license audit cycle and by negotiating the final settlement with the vendor. Our goal is to make the process as stress-free and cost-effective as possible. 

We offer you the opportunity to undergo an internal software license audit before your vendor audit starts. This gives you the opportunity to remedy risk areas and minimise financial exposure on any areas of non-compliance. We also provide invaluable support in helping you to validate a software license audit request and audit reports and we can advise on commercial settlement negotiation strategies and tactics to minimise financial exposure. 

Our full-service software license audit helps you to defend from audits seamlessly. With us: 

• You can minimise or completely remove potential financial penalties when you settle a software license audit with the publisher 
• Structure better enterprise agreements, either from the outset or on renewal or as a result of the audit, so that they are cost-optimised and minimise the risk of non-compliance 
• Safeguard sensitive data so it cannot be used by software publishers for future competition purposes 

I am a Senior Manager at FisherITS and I am responsible for the overall delivery of Compliance Optimisation and SAM Maturity Transformation programmes. I started my career as a license compliance auditor at a “Big Four” firm and have acted on behalf of a number of large software vendors by leading over a hundred enterprise-level license audits.

At FisherITS, my focus has been on providing my “poacher-turned-game-keeper” expertise to large enterprise customers to help them address tactical and strategic challenges in SAM and software licensing.