202208.01
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Top Three Challenges in Standard IBM License Agreements

IBM software licensing can present an array of interpretive and compliance challenges for even the most sophisticated licensees. Here are three of the most important things to keep in mind when planning to license IBM products under the company’s standard-form agreements (which, for the vast majority of IBM customers, are essentially the company’s only agreements,…

202206.08
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IBM Software Audits Complicated by Diverse License Types

Businesses that have endured software audits from industry groups like the BSA and the SIIA or from software publishers like Autodesk likely are familiar with the basic audit process of counting the total number of installations for audited products and comparing those installations against the number of licenses previously purchased to support them. There are…

202204.27
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IBM’s Standard Audit Clause is a Time Bomb

It is standard practice for software vendors to include clauses in their license agreements giving the vendors the right to invoke audits or some other mechanisms to ensure that the licensed products are used in a way that is consistent with agreed licensing restrictions. Most software consumers would agree – perhaps grudgingly – that such…

202202.18
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Avoid Pitfalls When Deploying ILMT for IBM Software

IBM software is expensive. In some cases, very expensive. While this may represent a necessary cost of doing business for many companies with mission-critical software solutions developed on or using IBM applications, all IBM customers clearly are incentivized to maximize the value of their software expenditures with Big Blue. For an increasing number of those…

202111.17
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Settlement Structuring for IBM Audits

Software-compliance audits initiated by IBM can be extremely burdensome and time-consuming and can force companies to face challenges that are somewhat unique among major-publisher audits. For one example, a significant component of IBM’s business model is the acquisition of other software vendors and the integration of those vendors into IBM’s product portfolio, which can complicate…

202110.07
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Don’t Short-Sheet the Internal Analysis in an IBM Audit

One of the most critical steps any business faces in any software audit is conducting an internal analysis of deployments to entitlements, preferably before any audit data is shared with the auditors. That internal review serves several purposes, including (1) identifying deployments for which a company’s license documentation may be lacking, thereby giving the company…

202108.24
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What If I Discover Unlicensed IBM Software on My Servers?

Software license compliance is a task that typically requires constant vigilance. Despite a CIO’s best efforts, it is almost inevitable that software will be deployed on a company’s computers at some point without having the necessary licenses to permit such use. For most software, the response to such a discovery will be to simply remove…

202104.13
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IBM Approves Limited Exceptions to ILMT Sub-Capacity Reporting

For more than a decade, IBM has allowed its end users to license IBM software products on a sub-capacity basis.  For IBM licensing purposes, sub-capacity licensing required customers to accept the sub-capacity licensing terms (originally in a separate sub-capacity license agreement signed by both parties), and ultimately as part of other licensing agreements.  The more…

202103.11
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Arguments Against ILMT – What Does and Doesn’t Work?

Each of the major software publishers has one or two tricks up its sleeve – tricks that often are missed by licensees – affecting how its server products may be used in virtualized environments. For example, Microsoft SQL Server requires a minimum of four core licenses per vCPU, even if the actual number of vCPUs…