Most IT managers do not like to be audited. When it comes to software, such audits can potentially mean big financial harm if you do not have good control about your licenses’ deployment and usage. But there is a lot to earn when looking at audits from another angle:

The productive output of a software audit can comprise a number of good insight:

1. You understand more about your internal processes
2. You will better understand the way your peers use IT
3. You will find a lot of useless license assignments (useless in terms of not being used!)
4. You will learn about the limitations of your vendor to control his own intellectual rights management
5. You will understand areas of pain for your contractual relationship and start thinking about changing your exposure

One of the most important effects, however, will be the preparations from your side to not be driven, but sitting in the driver’s seat yourself, and to establish audit protections like this:
Vendor has the right to audit the use of the licensed software within the licensed levels under the following governance:

• Vendor will give 45 days notice before the planned audit
• Vendor will respect issues of high priority of licensee (major upgrades, mergers or other projects that would cause harm to licensee if not support by audit-critical resources) to postpone the audit until the project conditions allow for a proper measurement
• Vendor will provide insights into the audit methodology for licensee to verify proper measurement of licenses, including the adjustment of system configuration settings that do not reflect the ongoing usage of the licensed software and are obsolete
• Vendor will present an audit report to finalize the audit results in alignment with the licensee
• In case of un-intentional non-compliance, licensee will purchase the required license levels according to Vendor’s licensing rules at a fee determined by the then current list prices, reduced by a discount which is not lower than the average discount of the last two license purchases.