It’s common for our customers to tell me about the problems they have managing their software licenses. Many have concerns about compliance and are worried that they may be subjected to a vendor audit. Increasingly they have the feeling that they have a large amount of software installed on their end users machines that is simply not used. In many cases it is exactly that, “just a feeling”.
Many businesses lack the tools to discover what software is actually used in their environment. AppClarity our new software waste management solution solves this problem. More on that later…
Shopping provides license control to prevent software from being installed when you have run out of licenses. It enables users to request and get software installed via the enterprise ‘app store’. Additionally Shopping keeps a count of the licenses that are deployed and knows the maximum allowed number of deployments for each application.
When the number of installations reaches its maximum the software is no longer able to be deployed. At this point, when the limit is reached, the relevant stakeholders, the requester, license manager and optionally an application specific license administrator, are notified via email and can take appropriate action to either purchase more licenses, reclaim them or remove them from availability.
Also, it’s possible to set a threshold so that when, for example, 90% of the maximum deployments has occurred the license manager is informed. This enables the proactive handling of software that is close to its entitlement limit rather than simply waiting until it’s too late. License managers can then run reclaim processes (available in AppClarity) to procure more licenses or remove the app from availability. Furthermore, it’s possible to track different counts and entitlements at different company locations which reflects the often distributed nature of license procurement. With AppClarity integration all this becomes even easier.
So if you have issues with license control Shopping can help you.