Companies risk paying over the odds for software or
becoming mired in legal wrangles because of who they trust to
negotiate IT deals.
More than half of the 400 senior finance professionals surveyed
by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales
(ICAEW) claimed to leave the monitoring, auditing and policing of
software to IT.
Only one in five included a software audit in their financial
review. While over two thirds did have processes in place to manage
their software assets, most checks were done manually by staff and
most only checked them once a year. Only 4% said they monitored
software every month.
‘Finance departments should be viewing software as an important
company asset and managing it in that way," says Vaughan Smith,
head of Software Asset Management at Microsoft, which sponsored the
research.
‘Not only should it be good business sense for companies to know
what software licences they own and what software they're using,
they could be saving as much as 25% on the costs of owning,
maintaining and supporting this asset but they need to gain control
of it first and monitor it on a frequent and ongoing basis.’
According to analyst firm IDC, we’re heading for a software
pricing shake-up as virtualisation technologies take hold.
Virtualisation blurs the lines between hardware and software,
allowing computing sources to be dynamically assigned to different
tasks.
Vendors will have to change their pricing structure, as current
licensing does not allow for splitting applications between
systems, says IDC