The metric counts, not the number
A hundred installations are not a hundred licences. They are a hundred, twelve or none, depending on how the vendor counts. Deriving a licence position from an installation list answers the wrong question.
The first question in a vendor audit sounds harmless: how many times is the product installed at your site? The answer usually arrives quickly, and it is rarely the answer that counts.
Because an installation count only becomes a licence statement once it is clear how the vendor counts.
The same installation, three results
A product sits on a hundred machines, twelve people use it, and it runs on a server with two sockets of eight cores each.
If the licence is tied to the named user, you need twelve. If it is tied to the device, you need a hundred. If it is licensed per core, you need sixteen, multiplied by a factor the vendor sets depending on the processor type. And with an enterprise licence the number may simply not matter.
It is the same estate. Only the counting rule differs.
Why this does not look like a detail, but gets expensive
We carry seventeen metrics in the module, because that many occur in practice: named user, concurrent users, per device, per server, per VM, per instance, per CPU, per core, processor value unit, per gigabyte of memory, client access licences for users and for devices, site, enterprise, output-based such as per page, per token or API call, and OEM.
Two of them additionally require a core factor, because the number of cores alone is not enough. One explicitly permits an overage.
Keeping all of that in a spreadsheet with a single column called "quantity" gives you no licence position, but an inventory list under a heading that promises something else.
The second hurdle comes before the first
Before anything can be calculated, the installed software has to be detected and named. That sounds trivial and is not. The same product appears in inventories under several spellings, with version numbers, editions and suffixes that sometimes belong to the product and sometimes do not.
Software discovery therefore separates matched from unresolved entries. The unresolved ones do not disappear and are not guessed at; they stand there as an open task and can be assigned individually.
A position that quietly skips unrecognised installations is worthless in an audit. The vendor will find them anyway.
Two directions, two entirely different bills
At the end sits the effective licence position, the reconciliation of entitlement against consumption. It can deviate in two directions, and the two have little in common.
Using more than you are entitled to is a compliance case with back payment, and it does not shrink while it stays undetected. Being entitled to more than you use means money sitting on unused seats, which is annoying but harmless.
Both are deviations; only one of them has a deadline.
What follows
A licence position does not start with counting but with the contract: which metric applies, for which period, in what quantity. Only then does the installation list help.
More on the licence management module page.
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