Once you have an accurate inventory of your software and calculated your entitlement you now need to match up your licenses to your software. Matching licenses to installed software sounds like a fairly simple process. However, this can be a time consuming and difficult task due to the complex nature of licensing and different models that each software vendor enforces. To do this manually just for one vendor may take several days.

There are three key activities that need to be carried out:

• Normalization of software inventory
• Understanding how the software is used
• Matching the license entitlement to the normalized inventory data

Normalization of software inventory

In this stage you need to rationalize, what could be thousands of different software products, into a list of licensable products and their install counts.  This often involves a deep understanding of the vendors’ products and importantly which of these products requires a license.  This can take several days for each vendor. Multiply this across multiple vendors and this presents a significant challenge.

SOURCE: certero.com