By Martin Kurzinski
I was just speaking with a customer the other day about optimizing their software spend while mitigating the risk of license compliance audits.? The customer then asked about taking this process to the next level.?How can they project savings from software license optimization moving
forward?? IT environments are always changing.? We discussed several factors that make managing software licenses a continued challenge, including:
- Changes in technology? e.g. application virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing
- Changes in license models? e.g. SQL Server processor based to core based licensing, changes in roaming use rights, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) licensing changes, etc.
- Optimizing hardware dependent license models?how do I choose the most cost effective hardware/software combination?
- Time and cost to implement a change to the environment?organizations need to evaluate the licensing impact of a change, prior to completing work, to minimize cost and risk
- Determining the effect on multiple software licenses due to a change to the environment ? e.g. operating system, application, and infrastructure software licenses
- Moves/Adds/Changes?support both Planned and Urgent ?Request For Change? service requests
- Planning for future growth?the need for trend analysis information to understand the cost impact of growth
Decisions made today can impact your software license position without you being aware until it is too late or you incur significant time and cost to revert the changes.? The concept of a license simulation is to provide you with a software license position prior to invoking any change.? This
?What If? analysis allows you to simulate the changes you plan to make and understand the impact on software licensing. For example, you may consider moving several Microsoft SQL database instances to a virtual farm ? the move can obviously reduce hardware cost, but what will that change do to your SQL Server license cost?? A processor based license may increase the per instance cost, so much so, that it can cost more than the savings in hardware.? However you may also reduce operating system costs.?Does the change make financial sense?
With a software licensing simulation capability, you can model your changes and instantly see the impact on managed licenses.? Changes include:
- Changes to hardware, for example, adding additional processors, logical partitions, etc.
- Adding/moving/removing hardware from your environment
- Adding/deleting software from existing computers
- Moving software from one computer to another, including movements of virtual machines
- Server clustering, active, passive, non-production, and backup roles, etc.
In the figure shown below, the impact of any of the described changes will be reflected in the license summary report.? This license summary details the changes from original license consumption, proposed new consumption, change in consumption, financial impact in dollars and the license compliance position itself (in breach vs. compliant).
Figure 1: What If Analysis License Summary Report
The simulation report provides you with the information needed to make the best business decisions and optimize your software spend while maintaining license compliance.? License simulations can help you better manage:
- Organizational growth
- Changes in the IT environment
- Technology advances
and assist in minimizing the impact of new software license models.
What changes do you foresee in your environment?? Is your organization moving to application virtualization?? Do you support server clustering?? Have you calculated the financial impact on licensing?? Hardware can be relatively inexpensive compared to software costs, yet many organizations do little analysis on how future changes will affect their software license position.? Now you can be proactive about software license management and optimization.
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