Pre-Audit Software Licensing Assessments

Don't get surprised by your IBM usage.

Designed to assist clients in identifying licensing gaps, planning for remediation, and lowering costs. Companies need to be pro-active in preparing their software licensing to manage the business risk of non-compliance.

In a pre-audit software compliance assessment, Canyon uses proprietary methodologies to do the following:

Identify software gaps by conducting a thorough analysis of your company’s licensing entitlements vs. software deployment (installation and actual usage).

Utilize tools required by the publisher (e.g. ILMT required for IBM) to generate the information that will be requested during a potential future audit.

Develop a detailed estimate of potential financial risk based on publishers' terms & conditions as well as auditors' approaches and tactics.

Generate options for remediation based on your company's IT environment and business objectives.

Provide corporate staff with an in-depth understanding of how publisher T&Cs, product changes, renewals, and other factors (e.g. IBM sub capacity) have driven and could, in the future, drive non-compliance in your environment (including virtualization, LPAPs, and cloud technology).

Prepare your staff on the audit process, including the detailed questions and data requests that will be involved.

The beneficial outcomes from this service include:

If you haven’t been audited over the last 1-3 years, you are probably on publisher lists: Corporations are being audited with increasing frequency. In fact, Gartner reports that firms are experiencing, on average, 2.53 audits per year. That includes the big four software publishers—IBM (including RedHat), Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft; and other vendors.

Addressing gaps prior to audit will reduce your financial risk: In the case of an audit, unexpected, unbudgeted audit findings can be shockingly high and management is rarely prepared for the financial ramifications and level of business risk involved. A publisher’s detailed assessment of non-compliance can exceed the amount the company has paid the publisher over the past decade, not including the penalties. Amounts demanded can range from tens of thousands to tens of millions depending on the size of the account and software deployment.

Preparation and Remediation will reduce impacts to business flow and use of staff resources: Most audits take 3-6 months, but the audit process for larger companies with more complex IT environments can be substantially longer, taking 6-18 months. You can reduce potential interruptions in business flow and decrease use of resources including executive attention, staff time, lost productivity, and legal services by ensuring compliance prior to an official audit.

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Frequently asked questions about our services

We respond to the preferences of our clients. Prior to and during the pandemic, we have worked well with clients remotely; however, we are available for on-site work, as required or desired by the client.

Yes. In today’s environment, it is important to keep track of licensing across all deployments (i.e. on-premise, hosted, private and public clouds), and for all license types (i.e. perpetual licensing, temporary licensing, hybrid, and SaaS licensing).

Yes. We can install ILMT and support the ILMT infrastructure across your IBM Enterprise for all supported platforms, i.e., Windows, AIX, Sun Solaris. We keep ILMT running efficiently by correcting Agent errors, applying fixes, managing upgrades etc.

Canyon has proprietary tools and processes we use in our backend to automate some of our data analysis; however, these processes do not require any tools to be installed or executed on-site at customer locations. In addition to working with ILMT, we also use customer tools such as SCCM, CASE, Service Now, SNOW, USU, Flexera or any other tools already deployed by your company. With some products, specific screen shots or use of commands are necessary to achieve results. We also rely on published license documentation from IBM and HCL in our work.

Yes. We manage many customers' ILMT infrastructure and can keep you in license compliance by working with you remotely through fixed management contracts.

Yes, one of the benefits of knowing one’s licensing position is the ability to save costs for unused or underutilized licenses, or to realize savings from activities such as changing metrics based on current and predicted deployment. This can be a specific scope of work or is often a natural by-product of a pre-audit licensing review or health-check.