Problem:

As organizations increasingly rely upon their IT infrastructures to deliver products and services to market, those infrastructures are becoming ever more virtualized and complex, consisting of hundreds of instances of off-the-shelf enterprise software products. Software costs now eat up around a third of IT budgets, and yet understanding actual software usage seems impossible. In addition, licensing models are becoming increasingly diverse and complex.

Central purchasing groups can only contract based on expected usage rather than actual usage – and they can no longer be sure that they are compliant with their licensing agreements. As a result they either heavily over-purchase, or risk the legal ramifications of under-licensing.

IT organizations struggle with managing multiple versions and patch levels of instances of the same software product – reducing agility and resiliency of the infrastructure.

Solution:

Tideway Foundation™ continuously discovers and recognizes all instances of software that exist and are running in the IT environment. As it uses agent-free discovery techniques as well as leveraging existing agents, it can find software running on servers of which the organization may not even be aware – fast and at low cost. Using its pre-populated knowledge base, it organizes this data by vendor, software product and version.

Organizations can now generate a clear understanding of how many software licenses are required to run their business. Because Foundation also discovers information about the server (real or virtual) and OS on which the software product is running many different licensing models can be supported (for example pricing by Server, by CPU or by CPU core).

Software policies ensure that out-of-compliance software is brought up-to-date by showing where the exceptions exist in the environment.

Finally, because Tideway Foundation understands dependencies between components – it is possible to identify software consolidation opportunities to generate further license savings.

Benefits:

• Ensure continuous software license compliance
• Reduce software license costs through consolidation and removal of unused software.
• Reduce version and patch diversity for key enterprise software to lower operational cost and risk
• Only pay for the software actually used
• 80% reduction in costs to discover and document IT environment

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License Optimization
Find out about Tideway’s new approach to license optimization.

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