January News Roundup

ITAM News & Analysis

06 February 2015

7 minute read

News

CCL Writes to Oracle

The Campaign for Clear Licensing published an open letter to Larry Ellison and Oracle in January on the back of their successful Oracle Seminar and other research. The letter highlights a number of issues that Oracle customers are telling the CCL they are facing, advises their documents contain a lack of clarity with licensing and also calls attention to their unhelpful audit approach. The CCL state in the letter:

These issues have resulted in customer relationships that are predominantly hostile and filled with deep-rooted mistrust, particularly when it comes to licensing and audits. We strongly believe that failing to address these concerns will hamper Oracle’s ability to persuade its customers to adopt its cloud computing services, as most are concerned that cloud computing services will lock them into Oracle even more than they already are.

The CCL letter has received a widespread reaction within the IT world, with a number of IT publications running news stories on the open letter. Keep an eye out on the CCL Twitter and CCL website for the latest developments in the Oracle case.

IBM ‘Lets 110,000’ Staff Go

Sky News reported that IBM has let 110,000 staff go in January. Whilst these reports are currently unconfirmed, the reason given for this huge number is, as Sky News states:

It will pave the way for IBM to focus on cloud computing, it is claimed, rather than its traditional hardware business.

Whilst this is obviously bad news for those concerned in the hardware departments of IBM, it will be interesting to see what cloud computing advancements they make in the future because of this reshuffle.

CIO’s Concerned About SaaS

Computer Weekly has reported that CIO’s are concerned about the levels of control they have with Software As A Service (SaaS). This is an interesting article highlighting the fact that CIO’s have an interest in SaaS, and want more control over what SaaS they use within their organisations. It just goes to show the high-level of professional that software services affects. It further highlights the important of ITAM to help manage SaaS. Computer Weekly states:

The CIOs surveys said that over half of cloud apps are bought by business users. According to over a third of all CIOs the growing cost of cloud subscriptions, managing the increasing number of cloud apps in use, and duplication of app functionality were in their top three concerns. Tracking and measuring usage is a big challenge. The survey found that 38% of organisations use the admin function of each separate cloud app to track and measure usage.

Stress Levels Rise for IT Professionals

Computer Weekly have also reported that stress levels for IT Professionals are on the increase, and significantly so from 5 years ago. The article states:

Figures from the managed offices company revealed 49% of IT workers admitted to being closer to burning out now than they were five years ago. The survey of more than 3,000 professionals showed the UK average across all work sectors was 48%. Triggers for IT workplace stress include a lack of exercise, feeling understaffed and job insecurity.

We all work in IT, we know it is stressful. However, being passionate about ITAM and understanding how the ITAM market is expanding, we would suggest that job insecurity would be at the lower end of an ITAM professionals stress levels. What do you think are the biggest causes of stress within ITAM? Get in contact and let us know!

Windows 10 Will Be a Free Upgrade, But Not For Businesses!

Microsoft announced recently that Windows 10 would be a free upgrade to existing Windows 7-8.1 customers. However, they have now announced that the upgrade will not be free to organisations. The Register states:

Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 8/8.1 Enterprise are not included in the terms of free Windows 10 Upgrade offer Microsoft announced last week.

Tough luck enterprise organisations!

Interesting reads

Oracle Best Practice Guide Part 1

We released the first part of our ‘Oracle Best Practice’ guides, based on the whitepaper we also published. The first part contains a number of different topics, including Oracle licensing and Oracle contracts. The article states:

Updated license or contract terms & conditions (T&C’s) are always best for Oracle, not the customer. The T&C’s are often changed without any obvious communication to the end user, which can cause the customer to be under licensed without them knowing. It is of vital importance that Oracle users or license managers keep on top of the changes Oracle make to the terms and conditions.

Keep looking out for the other articles in this series coming soon on the ITAM Review.

Software Ownership

This article has gained a lot of attention on social media forums such as LinkedIn. In this article we talk about who should ‘own’ software and software licenses within organisations. There are a number of arguments for assigning ownership to certain departments or cost centres, or assigning overall ownership to the business to combat any internal fighting or politics regarding who owns what software.

MDM & Its Relationship with ITAM

Mobile devices are now a vital part of any organisation. So how does mobile device management relate to ITAM? Should ITAM even be responsible for managing mobile assets, its applications and data? We discuss all in our MDM and it’s relationship with ITAM article!

E-book: How to Become a More Effective SAM Manager – License Dashboard

License Dashboard released an E-Book highlighting hints, tips and techniques on how to become a more effective SAM Manager.

Whitepapers

We released two whitepapers in January:

Introduction to Software Asset Management

This whitepaper is an Introduction to Software Asset Management. This whitepaper is aimed at anyone with an interest in the basics of SAM, and what key SAM processes is and what SAM actually does for an organisation.

Oracle Licensing Best Practice

The CCL released a whitepaper about Oracle Licensing best practices based on the content and feedback from recent research and the Oracle seminar. This whitepaper contains advice and general opinion from the event and research, and is well worth a read for anyone with a vested interest in Oracle software or licensing.

General

Juno where the storm is?!

Unfortunately our New York events were cancelled thanks to a storm named ‘Juno’. Whilst New York did not bare the brunt of the storm (Juno where the storm was?! Ha!) the state of emergency and various transport restrictions meant that we had no option but to cancel the events. We would like to thank delegates, sponsors and our event hosts for their understanding and commitment to rearranging the events. We can confirm the New York events will now take place in May and you can find more information here.

SAM tools satisfaction survey

Just before Christmas we asked our readers to participate in a SAM Tools satisfaction survey. We received over 100 replies and have compiled an initial results table. The results for January can be found here.

The survey is still open! Have your say and complete the survey!

Podcasts

We have been busy on the podcast front! We have released three podcasts in the month of January, all with different and interesting topics. You can find links to each podcast below:

Podcast Episode 6: SAM at AstraZeneca – Winning friends and influencing people
Podcast Episode 7: SAM Tool Implementation Success
Podcast Episode 8: The Oracle Negotiation Grey Zone

Remember, you can subscribe to our podcasts on both iTunes & Soundcloud.

That’s all for the January News Roundup, see you again next month!

January News Roundup