Clouds obscure software licensing

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Before virtualisation and cloud computing became the norm managing software licences was relatively straightforward: you paid for every computer on which you wanted to run the software, or you made sure you did not run it on more machines than permitted by your licence. With the rise of cloud computing and ‘virtual machines’ all that changes. And it does not get any easier.

A white paper on the topic ‘Cloud licensing and software Asset management’ – authored by Peter Björkman, CTO and partner of Snow Software, a developer of software asset management technologies – gives one example. “Organisations using IBM’s enterprise applications are now required to navigate the complexity of its PVU (processor value unit) licensing model. Here, licensing obligations and costs are dependent on the hardware processing power accessed by the application(s) and therefore the total value derived to the organisation from hardware units rather than simply counting the number of users requiring access.”…

Sure sounds complicated!

The white paper also singles out Oracle as “another vendor with notoriously complex licensing models, especially when it comes to virtualised environments, in which processing power and level of integration with other applications is taken into account, as well as the numbers of users requiring access.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.whatech.com/cloud-computing/18744-bit409-clouds-obscure-software-licensing

Subscribe to the CloudCow bi-monthly newsletter @ http://eepurl.com/smZeb