Context

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You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Compliance Management
  •   Implement Compliance Controls

Details

The pressures associated with managing software licenses are growing. Software vendors want you to demonstrate that you comply with your agreements. Audits force you to invest substantial time and resources in collecting software use data.

Regardless of the complexity of your organization or the nuances of vendor license agreements, you can use IBM® Tivoli® License Compliance Manager to leverage industry-standard licensing models to track software installation and software use. Tivoli License Compliance Manager supports a wide array of license agreements, ranging from number of installed copies to memory and CPU capacity-based allotments to concurrent software use with or without the ability to run multiple sessions for each user, group, or node. Tivoli License Compliance Manager provides the following benefits that help you set up compliance controls:

• Consolidation of information about installed products and software use
• The capability to compare the data for created, installed, and used licenses
• The capability to associate contracts to licenses
• The ability to assign licenses to a distribution quota
• The capability to define the level of compliance to licensing agreements
• Maintenance of historical software use information and the provision of reports to assist in meeting future license requirements
• Real-time reporting of software and license use information, and an inventory of installed software
• Ability to export reports to a standard XML interface
• Automatic generation of alerts when license use reaches a defined level
• A flexible architecture that enables you to scale the installation to fit your license management needs
• A flexible method of defining rules for license allocation, including the facility to assign licenses to specific users, nodes, and groups of nodes

Tivoli License Compliance Manager has a contract management feature that enables you to link product entitlements to individual contracts. By associating contracts with licenses, you can easily compare software use against contracts across your organization. Furthermore, Tivoli License Compliance Manager enables you to manage multiple contracts with a single vendor for the same product.

You can use Tivoli License Compliance Manager to set the level of product compliance to the conditions of licenses, to meter the use of software products by recording and reporting their presence and levels of use on monitored nodes, or to do both of these tasks.

For additional information about how to set up contracts and licenses to monitor software license compliance, refer to the IBM Tivoli License Compliance Manager Administration Guide Version 2.1 located on the IBM web site in the Tivoli Information Center

For More Information

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