Published on the 29/05/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
A new survey has found that Australian businesses face far more software audits than their international peers – and 87 percent of those audited received top-up bills because of licence problems…
It appears that Australian businesses are being targeted by software vendors more than their international peers; as part of an international survey of 1988 organisations 84 percent of the 160 Australian respondents report having faced a vendor-initiated software audit in the last 18-24 months. This is much higher than the overall global figure of just 63 percent.
The survey, which was conducted by IDC on behalf of Flexera, found that 98 percent of organisations audited were not compliant with the terms of their licence agreement, and 87 percent had to pay extra fees, with 65 percent reporting those fees were for $1 million or more.
Tom Canning, APAC vice president for Flexera told iStart that the problem often arose because of virtualisation which meant some organisations were not keeping proper track of their software use. “This is driving complexity from a licensing point of view.” The problem was generally accidental he said, because organisations bought say, five licences, and deployed five copies of the software but then used the “wrong hardware because of virtualisation partitioning”.
He acknowledged the problem was a cause of some significant frustration among enterprise users.
“IT is trying to do the right thing for the business. In many organisations there is an enterprise agreement and companies often think that covers you. But the reality is very different – they all have restrictions in them,” he said, adding that the restrictions in heavily negotiated enterprise contracts could be significant.
Asked why Australian companies seemed to be more of an audit target than their international peers, Canning acknowledged it could be partly due to the generally higher cost of software in Australia.
“That could be part of the problem. I don’t know the motivation, but the statistics are very clear,” he added.
Some vendors are more aggressive in their auditing practices than others. For example, Microsoft was the most frequent auditor, with 60 percent of respondents reporting that they have been audited by Microsoft within the last year. Within that same timeframe, 51 percent report having been audited by IBM, 23 percent by Oracle, 17 percent by SAP, 16 percent by Adobe, and 14 percent by Symantec.
