Enterprise Software is a $300B+ global industry. IT Services make for a market 3x that of software, estimated at more than $900B. These numbers indicate two realities: (1) The IT market is massive, and (2) Vendors capitalise in significant ways beyond the core set of goods they sell. Services are one form of capitalisation. Another is the ever-unpopular practice of license auditing.

Virtualisation greatly increases efficiency, but also introduces enormous software license compliance complexity and risk. Device-centric software licensing, like that practiced by Oracle, Microsoft, and others requires organisations to license every CPU socket or core on which an application could potentially run. Capabilities such as on-demand provisioning, VM live migration and high availability, left unchecked, can incur tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in license accruals as workloads move about the infrastructure. When organizations face licensing audits, the resulting invoice can negate the efficiency gains of virtualisation entirely.

This eBook discloses high-level findings of VMTurbo’s September 2015 industry survey “Licensing, Audits & Compliance in the Cloud Era”, and offers a solution for controlling workload performance while mitigating compliance risk called Performance-Driven Licensing.