$50 million business case for license management with application streaming
02/05/2008
Posted by Simon Dadswell, Channel Marketing Manager, Endeavors Technologies.
Never has the business case for improving license management control with application streaming been so compelling:
The business challenge
Recently, in the AdelaideNow press it has been reported that the Australian state government has bungled a deal worth more than $50 million over five years. The government purchased computer software for over 12,000 computers for the Health department and each was loaded up with $675 worth of Microsoft Office software. It transpires that just 4,000 of these computers actually needed the software.
The business opportunity
Application streaming is a next-generation software delivery technology designed to prevent this issue.
Application streaming enables organizations – state authorities and businesses alike – to address the growing software license management challenge; to control the management and compliance of existing software licenses and make informed business decisions in software license purchasing negotiations.
With application streaming, IT departments are able to stream software from the corporate data centre where it belongs to client devices, on-demand. This means the software does not reside in full, or permanently, on the desktop. IT managers centralize the administration of software management and can intuitively and easily grant and restrict end user access to a central pool of software licenses.
Application streaming enables IT departments to automate the management of software licenses and control the total number of licenses owned in relation to actual usage. They have an up-to-the moment view of software license deployment (including infrequent software license usage or software licenses that have become inactive due to decommissioned machines or employees leaving the business etc.) to help make accurate decisions in software license purchases, including software license reconciliation, software compliance reporting, upgrade license management, and tracking of software license costs.
In addition, IT managers obtain the ability to control the entire software distribution cycle - software delivery, updates and patches, revoking of software etc. They stream software from a central location and enable self-service access to applications which dramatically reduces the software management overhead and eliminates the threat of software piracy. With application streaming, IT managers can speed up the delivery of software applications to end users, ensure they have access to what they need, when they need it, while restrict unauthorized access, and substantially lower IT support costs.
In short, it’s easy to criticize governments for getting themselves in the position of over-licensing software; being locked-in by antiquated software delivery technologies, and unable to make accurate and informed decisions in software license purchasing. However, when it comes to $50 million of tax payer’s money, cynics would argue the business case for application streaming - that is acclaimed to be the next generation of software delivery technologies and a killer to terminal server based software license management practices – is compelling.
