BSA Record Fine of £250,000
An unnamed UK company has agreed to pay a record fine of £250,000 for running unlicensed software.
The company (which operates in the infrastructure and public services sector) was running unlicensed copies of Adobe, Autodesk, and Microsoft software on hundreds of PCs across several UK locations.
The BSA is highly active and is said to be investigating a number of large UK companies who are believe to be running un-licensed Software.
The BSA is not the only organsiation actively auditing customers. A recent Gartner study showed that major software vendors such as Adobe, IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft, Oracle and Attachmate are aggressively auditing customers where they believe there is unlicensed copies of their software in use.
Companies should be protecting themselves against such activity but how?
By implementing good Software Asset Management processes to adequately manage an organisation’s software assets. This will involve technology, people and processes.
Deploy an autodiscovery/inventory such as Centennial Discovery so the organisation has an understanding of what assets are deployed across the organisation. Combine this with licence management technology such as Centennial License Manager 2.0 which will launch September 2007 and the organisation will be on the road to gaining control of their software assets.
Implement good SAM processes such as those recommended in ITIL guide to Software Asset mangement. http://www.best-management-practice.com/ or in the ISO/IEC 19770-1 Standard for Software Asset Management and the organisation should avoid the risk of a vendor audit and associated.
If an audit is requested by a vendor these processes should make it a relatively straightforward process as it will be easy to demonstrate what the compliance position is and the organisation will be on the front foot of any negotiations with vendors.
