Minimise IT Cost Risk

Gartner estimate the average cost of a software licence audit for an enterprise business to be $500,000. This does not include the disruption to business as usual activities during the process which can commonly last anywhere from three to six months. Audit activity is not limited to mega vendors of IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. Tier two vendors also need to be accounted for – a Quest audit or Micro Focus Audit can be time consuming and costly. Most organisations will not be voluntarily noncompliant and will, to the best of their ability, attempt to follow licensing rules and contractual obligations. FisherITS have observed licence compliance audit activities from many of the major vendors that exploit unclear or badly designed license rules, making it seem that organisations have serious licensing compliancy issues with remediation costs for audit settlement resulting in a bill for tens of millions of dollars. 

When it comes to software license audits, we are on your side. Often there are no intentional compliance issues, just configuration problems or complicated rules exploited by vendors. These issues can still run into huge remediation costs to be claimed by the vendor. Vendors often don’t play fair in these situations, but we are here to help you understand the situation and guide you through the process.  

Managing software licenses is complicated for enterprise organisations and it is not possible for most businesses to employ licensing experts across all the software publishers installed on their estate. In our experience even the most proactive of ITAM teams will have some areas of the business that are still exposed to noncompliance risks. Any changes to an organisation will impact upon the licensing position for major vendors, and when responsibility for software license management is decentralized, often across multiple regions, any business is guaranteed to be at risk of audit cost risks. 

FisherITS provides a multi-lingual team of expert licensing consultants across all the world’s major software vendors, including SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and more. Check out our Vendor Expertise for a list of vendors frequently covered

FisherITS provides software audit defence throughout the audit process for large and fast-growing organisations. We help guide communication between the organisation and vendor every step of the way, optimising the approach and reviewing the auditor’s work. We can help guide the settlement negotiation to minimise the eventual spend. 

An effective audit defence strategy will not only minimise IT cost risks, it will also protect against major disruption to planned IT activities and provide a platform of software, hardware, user and licensing data that can be utilised to the benefit of other upcoming projects and optimisation reviews.  

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.