In a bid to reduce licence costs, property insurer St
Paul International Insurance has deployed Tivoli Licence Manager, a
tool from IBM that tracks the software used within an
organisation.
St Paul is the first European company to implement the new IBM
software. Installed by system integrator Elyzium, Tivoli Licence
Manager has been distributed to 750 users in five offices.
The data produced by Licence Manager has been used to help St Paul
identify savings when purchasing Microsoft Office licences.
Matt Barlow, IT director at St Paul, said Tivoli Licence Manager
enabled the company to identify that it had bought too many copies
of Microsoft Access. "We were able to reduce the number of licensed
copies of Access from 300 to 50," he said.
Having identified the number of Access users in the company, Barlow
decided that he could not justify purchasing Microsoft Office
Professional Edition, which contains Access.
Instead, he opted for Microsoft Standard Edition, which does not
contain Access, and bought individual licences for users who needed
it. By replacing the Professional edition with the Standard edition
of Office, Barlow estimated that he saved about £150 per
user.
A common problem Barlow identified when using Tivoli Licence
Manager was that when staff left the company and a replacement took
over a PC, the new staff member would not necessarily need the same
software.
The Tivoli software was used to check which software was loaded
onto each machine. IT staff could then remove any redundant
packages, thus reducing the number of unnecessary licences.
Barlow said there was a possibility of reducing the costs of
Microsoft licensing even further in the future. "We know that 80%
to 90% of our staff do not use Powerpoint, so it does not make
sense to purchase it," he said.
Potentially, the company could license individual copies of
software from Microsoft, such as Word or Excel, rather than the
entire suite.
St Paul also found it could save additional money by purchasing a
site licence for the shareware Winzip compression tool, rather than
paying an individual fee for each user.
Barlow said another possible use for Tivoli Licence Manager would
be in tracking the level of software patches used on machines
within the company. This would enable the implementation of
automatic patching.
"As we develop automatic patching we will be able to see what
software build is running on each PC across the company," Barlow
said.