As I mentioned in Partnering for Profit or Pleasure I have a few words to say about software vendor audits. Unfortunately, they’re all unprintable, especially on AssLickIn, so instead here’s a vat of vitriol on these modern-day robber barons.
Knob Your Customer
As you peruse your shrinking IT budget, the software section is likely to include the usual suspects: Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle, and SAP. But these six AMIGOS are not your friends. They are in fact the worst perpetrators of that most painful and punitive event, the software audit.
License to Shill
What’s so bad about a software audit then? If you have deployed your software in accordance with your software licence then you should be fine, shouldn’t you? Well if anyone could understand their contracts there wouldn’t be a problem. However, the sneaky software suppliers have made it almost impossible to be honest, and here’s why:
There Ain’t No Sanity Clause
How is software licensed? In a way to maximise the profit of the vendor. That’s it. Look at the variety of ways in which software licenses are calculated [deep breath]: per device, per unique/concurrent/named/floating/token/full/developer/end user, per server/VM/partition/processor/(physical/virtual) core, processor/resource value unit, IP address, Device/User CAL, user subscription, customer/policy/contract/record, views, storage, cycles/transactions, access/day/month/year, capacity, in perpetuity/fixed period/subscription, owned/licensed/rented, PaaS/SaaS/XaaS, site/location/country/trading block, and souls – typically written in blood on the last page.
Complicated
Looking at the list above you should get an inkling of the difficulties in understanding or conforming to contracts. Most companies have had to grow a significant IT Asset Management function to even get close to understanding what they are using, and no one has successfully automated the monitoring and compliance of the software assets in particular. The vendors in turn have spotted that if they don’t make it easy for clients to accurately know or manage their licenses, rather than worry unduly about piracy, they can allow customers to lose control of their software usage, and then shaft them for breaking the incomprehensible terms of the 200 page contract.
Soft Sell
Obviously, like all commercial businesses, software companies are in it to make loads of money. If they were adding loads of benefit to your organisation you wouldn’t be too concerned as you could justify the cost. Unfortunately, the vendors (the successful ones anyway) have a cunning strategy to maximise their profits at your expense. It goes as follows:
- Give away or undercut the competition to get their software in
- Help you make their software essential to your business
- Hound/backstab/buy their rivals so you can’t easily change
- Ratchet the price up to milk you now you’re locked in
- Run regular software audits to sting you for more dosh and/or force you to buy more software to escape fines and public humiliation
- Laugh in your face as you get fired for losing control of your IT costs, and then stitch up your successor
Bastards of the Universe
With the pandemic affecting virtually all organisations, do you think they will be sympathetic this year? No, they are all increasing the size of their license teams and will be running more frequent checks on their victims customers to screw them for even more – think Monty Python’s Dennis Moore – “Steals from the poor, Gives to the rich, Stupid b*tch”.
Shaft
To give a personal example, one company I worked for was hit with a $10M fine for some software we’d bought for $600K, as it was running on a large cluster, albeit only using a fraction of the processor power. It took us two years to get this figure down to a still unacceptable amount and we were forced to buy more of their crappy software to keep them quiet. We then worked hard on removing all their software as quickly as possible and won’t use them again, and even went so far as taking them off our Christmas card list – it was that serious.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
How can you avoid this pain? You might think the move to cloud and running metered software means you won’t get fooled again. But this will only cover some of your assets and is unlikely to help with client device software. Also, cloud service vendors are also following the 6-step strategy above to screw you over so beware of future lock-ins. There’s no one approach to avoid the shafting. A combination of the following may help but it will depend on your specific situation:
- Open Source
- Multi-vendor for each service
- DIY using agile, low-code, etc
- Working dynamic ITAM tools
- Go back to paper and slide rulers
As you can tell, this topic makes me ‘king furious, particularly in this difficult year, hence the blog title. Feel free to share your own experiences as the more this shameful practice is exposed, the more we can embarrass the vendors back.
‘king John Moe
Recycled Bullsh-IT 
Leave a comment