Companies with a large number of workstations need to purchase licenses for a multitude of different software solutions and applications. Administrators have no choice but to find an efficient way to manage existing licenses and determine the number of software packages that are actually being used.

Different licensing models, a multitude of licenses, and the different requirements of the individual workstations can easily create the following problems:

• The number of licenses available doesn't match the number of software installations. Inadequate licensing can result in fines and penalty payments.
• Licenses are available in excess. Money could be saved on support and maintenance costs.
• There are enough licenses deployed throughout the company. They are, however, assigned to the wrong users or user groups.

One purpose of license management is to find out if a company needs to purchase additional software licenses or if it has underutilized licenses.

In addition to detecting existing licenses and software installations, license management has to meet a number of other important requirements:

• automated discovery of installed licenses using standard protocols
• definition of software groups and subgroups to provide a better overview of how licenses are distributed
• definition of license pools to show shared licenses
• assignment of licenses to a certain group of computers to ensure that workstations within the same department or cost center can be used independently of specific users

theGuard! CMDB satisfies all of the above requirements and reduces the need for manual intervention in the license management process. Our license management is a valuable tool that helps you use the licenses you need where you need them.