From Burden to Benefit: IBM's License Metric Tool – PT II

In the final instalment of his two-part blog, Ruben Claes, PreSales Consultant at Snow, explains why IBM’s License Metric Tool needs to be managed carefully to control compliance risk, and that the key to creating value is to integrate it with all existing SAM processes and technologies.

In the final instalment of his two-part blog, Ruben Claes, PreSales Consultant at Snow, explains why IBM’s License Metric Tool needs to be managed carefully to control compliance risk, and that the key to creating value is to integrate it with all existing SAM processes and technologies. 

Successful organizations have to go through various and distinct steps with ILMT.

The first, which I discussed in Part I of my blog, are burden and benefit. The stages that follow are an understanding of risk and value, which I explain here.

Why is ILMT a risk?

As customers begin to see the strengths and benefits of ILMT, they also start to realize it’s not simply about quickly installing something. The tool needs to be managed. Without proper management of your ILMT deployment, a customer will face compliance risks that include under-reporting, over-reporting but most importantly, the full-capacity risk! Let’s discuss these different risks:

The problem here is that it’s difficult to control what you don’t know. The ‘finding’ typically only appears in an audit report, where full-capacity conditions were applied to your costly WebSphere product on those machines where the ILMT agent was not installed. It is not uncommon for the PVU requirements in such scenarios of a 10% ‘full-capacity’ environment to be more costly than the 90% ILMT managed ‘sub-capacity’ environment. It would be regrettable to say the least to have to pay for the full physical hardware behind a simple VM or LPAR that is not even using a fraction of the capacity … yet it remains the top issue in most IBM audits.

How do we create value?

Unfortunately, many IBM customers never reach this last maturity level in their ILMT journey, but it’s only at this stage that ILMT starts paying off. It’s only at this point that most risks are mitigated and ILMT data starts enriching your SAM processes. The key is to integrate the ILMT data in your existing SAM technology and processes. In this way, you enjoy the best of both worlds. Snow offers out-of-the-box ILMT and TADd integration based on its Snow Integration Connector technology, allowing you to:

Based on my background as an IBM auditor, I would encourage all IBM customers with virtualized PVU/RVU products to deploy ILMT. This is a first important step towards getting control and reaching compliance for IBM in an area that is the most difficult to manage: your virtualized environments. Integrating with your SAM technology is the logical next step and will finally create value for your organization.

As I have outlined above, that value is not created by merely merging data, but by combining inventory technology and license intelligence through the Snow Integration Connectors, allowing your Software Asset Management in one single platform, Snow License Manager. Snow Software is continuously investigating and improving its licensing algorithms and believes that SAM tools will one day be able to deliver the same data quality in PVU requirement calculations as technology such as ILMT today.

However, as long as IBM customers remain required to deploy ILMT (or TADd / BigFix Inventory) to obtain sub-capacity eligibility, Snow will provide integration functionality to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Speak to one of our Licensing Experts today to learn more.