Enterprise software licensing is complex, costly and easy to lose track of, especially in these days of servers on demand via infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and rapid setup and movement of virtual machines.  Many organizations are finding that vendor software audits uncover under-licensing resulting in (sometimes significant) license fee increases.

For example ........... Did you know that many enterprise class software applications are licensed per processor core?  Not per core that you use, but the number of processor cores in your server, and in some cases, on the number of processor cores per cluster -regardless of how many cores you actually use for your app!  The video will show you more details on this:

Let's look at further cost saving ideas that Cisco Services could help you identify.

Do you know how many old servers you have that are running software apps ... that could be replaced by a modern Cisco UCS server, reducing your processor core count and freeing up software licenses you could re-purpose to another project or business unit?  (You could be a hero if you initiate such a "save to invest" program!)

Are you aware of applications that your team may have installed in the past ..... which are now sitting idle and unused... for which you are still paying license (and support!) fees for?

And finally -have you investigated how many servers (physical and/or virtual) you have that are physically idle, that haven't been used in anger for say 90 days or more?   (Industry studies suggest 20-30% of a typical data center estate is idle!  I blogged on this a while back.)

How Cisco Services Can Help You Save on Software Costs!

Many IT shops are challenged with enterprise software costs.  With the complexity of enterprise  "all you can eat" software license agreements, it's often hard and specialist work in order to ascertain a comprehensive licensing position.   This complexity is compounded with virtualization: it's quite simply plain easy for an engineer to spin up additional instances of software apps, and all too easy to forget to shut them down when projects finish.

Cisco Services can help you cost rationalise your enterprise software applications.  The savings could be significant!

How do we do this?  As part of our Cisco Data Center Cost Rationalization Services, we use advanced software discovery and asset analysis software from our partner iQuate.  We not only identify areas of savings, we can also identify issues with software license compliance.  We can also help you remediate these issues, with Cisco Application Migration Services, where we can help you adopt the most cost effective licensing position, which maintaining your architectural requirements for resiliency, for example. The video above will help illustrate our approach.

Please, then, do get in touch if any of these savings appeal to you!

PS: For more information, please refer to some of my earlier blogs:

• The Cisco Application Dependency Mapping service
• The problem of Idle Servers -part 1 and part 2
• How to develop a "Save to invest" program -part 1 and part 2.