The FAST team worked with Sheffield Trading Standards following a whistle-blowing telephone call from a former hospital employee.

The hospital responded that the under-licensing had been a “genuine error which we resolved very quickly as soon as we became aware of the situation”.

The case highlights the need for a more proactive stance on software license management, showing how organization from all sectors need to ensure they have an accurate view on how many applications are in use versus how many licenses they hold.

The result is a £24,000 settlement with the BSA and a further £20,000 (total: US $67,000) to get the necessary licenses. According to the BSA, the investigation came as a result of a whistle-blower making a call to the licensing watchdog.

The BSA expressed its disappointment that an organization so familiar with the concept of intellectual property should fall foul of licensing laws.

Further, Gartner states that around 20 percent of all ITAM calls it takes are now concerned with software audits, compared with around 5 - 8 percent historically.

IBM says it offered to reach a settlement with the broker, but that this was rejected and the illegal software has still not been deleted from the company’s network. IBM is asking the court to award it unspecified damages and issue an injunction that would impound all copies of Informix software that it believes were improperly downloaded.

In total, the Australian BSA agreed settlements worth a total of AU $331,678 with 12 companies during 2009.

The BSA also reported that it received a record number of 95 leads about businesses using unlicensed or pirated software in 2009 (up from 44 leads reported in 2008).

According to the BSA, the two highest individual settlements in Australia last year were worth AU $90,000 and $85,000 respectively. On top of these settlement bills, as part of the settlement, each business caught out also had to purchase valid licences for its continuing or future use of BSA member software products. All the companies involved have also agreed to now implement proper Software Asset Management (SAM).

The change allows organizations to rent, lease or outsource PCs running Windows and Office without the need for expensive monthly subscriptions.

Microsoft has introduced the change with a promotional offer until June 30, saving organizations up to 30 percent on the usual prices.

BSA EMEA compliance marketing director Julian Swan commented: “…as long as unlicensed software accounts for more than one in every four pieces of business software, we will continue to take a hard line. Eventually the message will get through.”

Not only was the overall volume of audits increased, but the causes of disputes were also wider ranging than ever before, with virtualization and multiplexing key issues.

In Forrester’s new report ‘Surviving a Software Audit‘, Principal Analyst, Duncan Jones, claims that “…many vendors’ audit teams seemed to want to meet their revenue targets by exploiting technicalities and loopholes.”

And while it is acknowledged that software vendors have every legitimate right to audit for license compliance, the tactics of some vendors are perceived as underhand - akin to a traffic cop hiding in the bushes with a radar gun.

Forrester has some good advice for those charged with maintaining an organization’s compliance: Don’t avoid the audit, co-operate with the vendor [we’d go further and suggest pre-empting the audit with effective Discovery and License Management to truly put yourself in the driving seat] and demonstrate good SAM practices to persuade the vendor that you’re not a good ‘revenue opportunity’.

What’s that got to do with SAM? Well, on the surface, not a lot.

But. As anyone involved in a SAM project knows, the result of the SAM program is only as good as the inventory information that goes in. And good inventory tools don’t just audit software, they can provide a lot of hardware information too.

In the case of the battery recalls, many organizations will face a lot of manual labor to identify what machines on their network are affected. However, by identifying the manufacturer, model and BIOS date of machines, finding those affected by the battery recall becomes child’s play - significantly reducing the time and effort, and avoiding a potentially dangerous mishap.

Just another example of how an organizations’ investment in SAM can pay dividends across all areas of IT operations.

The report acknowledges that SAM has suffered from a ‘nice to have’ rather than ‘must have’ perception historically, but that this is now changing as organizations appreciate both the risks of unmanaged software and the potential benefits of reduced software expenditure and better availability of software assets.

The report even goes as far as to state: “It will not be long, in fact, before companies with limited SAM capabilities will become the exception.”