Compliance concerns most IT executives, survey shows

A majority of IT executives are not confident that they are fully compliant with software license agreements, according to a recent survey conducted by King Research.

The research firm, per the request of systems management vendor Kace, polled 350 IT executives about the current state of software license compliance in IT. Nearly 70% of respondents reported they are not confident that they are fully in compliance with software license agreements, 67% don't believe their company has taken appropriate steps to achieve compliance and 60% said they believed they had unlicensed software deployed.

Of those polled, 56% said they track software license compliance manually or not at all, and only 8% have a fully automated process for tracking this information. Nearly three-quarters said they are not prepared for a software audit, 16% said they can automatically report on compliance and 20% didn't believe they could report on compliance at all.

"In reality, most companies want to be in compliance, but they are struggling with the effort to discover software assets, track license assignments, reconcile purchased licenses to installed software and take the necessary steps to ensure compliance," stated Dian Hagglund, the author of King Research's study.

Separately, CA recently announced a new product, among several this week, designed to help automate the process of checking software licenses for compliance across a large distributed enterprise.

"We get audited twice per year and we do quarterly internal audits. Our method of using spreadsheets to manage software licenses won't stand up against all the compliance requirements we have to deal with. CA sees that customers are challenged by this and are fearful of lawsuits. We kept asking, 'Isn't there a more automated way to do this?' and it seems CA is answering that question," says Harry Butler, IT project manager at Elbit Systems of America, a defense manufacturing company in Fort Worth, Texas.