Threats to drive sales and trick customers are not acceptable under any economic climate. Companies can avoid vendor audit hassles and look calmly into the face of threats to pick their pockets by performing self-audits to determine needs, and being software compliant.
In Paul N. Richter's article Firebird targets the enterprise database, Richter describes Allan Grant's vendor sharp practices experience during the vendor audit by one user being over the concurrent license limit for three minutes during a one week period. This was obviously a passively metered concurrent license. The agreement can be tailored to accommodate this situation. By self-monitoring application usage, a company can plan for the need of additional licenses or switch to active metering so the set limit cannot be exceeded.
Art Jahnke discusses vendor audits, threatening letters and intimidation in his blog entry. Some threatening letters are fishing expeditions. Others are not. Initiate a procedure to get any threatening letter to your well-informed legal council to handle in a tactful manner.
One comment to Jahnke's blog entry states that software management is a specialty field. Yes it is. “Some companies can devote the internal resources to, say, the staffing of an IT asset manager; others can't or will not.” And, yes, keeping up with the ever-changing software rules, terms and conditions game is no easy matter. However, a Certified Software Asset Manager or Certified IT Asset Manager brings significant ROI while keeping the wolves at bay.
