"Business Value from Metering Software Usage"

OpeniT’s Signe Marie Stenseth explains in her article how to reduce it costs and enhance your business, by metering and analyzing IT usage data.
She identifies six categories of benefits flowing from software usage metering;

• View Real-time Usage and Capture Trends - By possessing accurate information about their IT assets, leaders can avoid paying for unnecessary products or services, and they have the control needed to successfully handle technology deployment projects, training, contract negotiations, software audits and compliance requests, based on documented needs.
• Technical Architecture Not a Determinant for Software License Agreements - Many software vendors offer different pricing for Wide Area Network (WAN) vs. Local Area Network (LAN) licenses. It can be valuable to compare the merits of these scenarios and others, before choosing the best license regime for your company, and take advantage of concurrent license sharing across time zones.
• Ask for More Flexibility in Your Agreements - With Pay-per-use based agreements , you may need to introduce a high and a low usage watermark, to protect both you and the provider, but you will still benefit from a far more flexible agreement instead of traditional rental or perpetual agreement offers with fixed number of users or applications.
• Harvest Inactive Licenses – Automatically - An innovative way to cut license costs at an application level is to automate harvesting of inactive software. When an inactive user wants to use the application again, the user can reclaim the license with one click and get back to work without losing any work done before termination. In this case, the company gained a high return on their investment and they were able to cut back on licenses not in active use.
• Introduce Chargeback - Leaders of business units appreciate transparency as well as fair and reliable chargeback mechanisms as both contribute to better valuation of IT services. In addition to meeting regulatory financial reporting requirements, chargeback creates greater awareness of which assets are in use and what they cost, resulting in conscious planning and fiscal stewardship. In the long run, reducing waste delivers significant IT costs savings, especially in a larger and more complex environment.
• Build Application Usage Dashboards for All Stakeholders - With so many stakeholders that have budgets or are in charge of support and training, having easy access to usage data through dashboards is essential: each manager should look at trends in usage for their assets or user groups on an ongoing basis.

Read more about the benefits of metering in Information Technology Asset Knowledge, October 2011 Issue (p. 105-108), published by International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Suffield, Ohio, 44260, USA.