Apologies for the wait, we're overwhelmed. Yes, this is the hospital. You need to what?! Do a software licence audit? Software vendors have been targeting hospitals with licence audits while medical units find themselves overstretched with patients due to a surge in global coronavirus cases. According to research from the IT Asset Management Forum, which counts Vodafone, Danske Bank and Procter & Gamble among its members, vendors have sought …
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As I actually had Covid for Christma and New Year, (honestly) I can confirm the following.....
1. At all times I knew where I stood, or rather laid.
2. The GPs/nurses at no point changed the T&Cs
All in complete contrast to software licensing,
No Joke icon, because as I experienced, Covid is no joke... where software licensing is a joke....
people actually want to visit hospitals filled to overflowing with infectious, potentially lethal disease? I hope their employers appreciate their duty of care and provide them with full PPE.
I do appreciate that any cashflow a company can get at the moment is doubly valuable to a company's survival, but surely the current environment should be taken into consideration?
I was assuming that the people doing the audit were doing so remotely by sending lots of communications to the staff and demanding information about the network and machines running the software. If they did show up, there are all sorts of unpleasant things that could befall someone willing to endanger others when it's not necessary. I'd especially enjoy mistaking them for a cleaner and sending them to the least pleasant section, having previously informed all the staff in that area to be very busy if they have the miracle of not already being so and never acknowledge the questions of the new cleaner except to prevent them from leaving and occasionally reprimand them for not cleaning. Maybe it's a good thing I don't work for a hospital.
Not sure what I think about this.
Yes, it seems insensitive timing, but if hospitals say they are busier than ever, presumably their need for software licences will also have peaked beyond normal (aka paid for) limits.
Can the software suppliers rely on hospitals doing retrospective audits after the crisis has passed, paying for the extra licences for the peak use? I suspect not.
Will the software companies be in trouble without the extra revenue? I doubt it.
Is it a risk I'd be willing to take? No!
A lot of staff who have been told to work from home won't be using the same systems they did in hospitals, many will but over all license use will likely drop. There's also fewer projects etc going on so some project staff will have been let go or posts not filled so funding is freed up elsewhere again resulting in less utilisation of licenses.
You've also got admin staff doing other roles. I know I've cleaned beds etc rather than doing my normal info sec duties occasionally. We're not actually in wards or COVID areas, just freeing up staff who are better trained to focus on those that need the help most. We do a bit of the donkey work once trained up etc.
Somehow, I think the hospitals will probably be trustworthy enough to state the number of licenses they used later. That's always assuming the license system allows them to increase their usage without asking for payment anyway, and if the licensing model says they have to pay per computer, the software will likely enforce that. More importantly, the audit itself is going to cause a lot of problems for the hospital, while the theoretical delay in payment will probably be a drop in a bucket for a big software company who already gets paid for existing licenses. If they want to fight in the court of public opinion, it will end badly for them.
I'm in IT at a hospital and I can tell you while we have sorted out our extra licensing as needed back in March last yea the last thing we need right now (working 13 hour days 6 days a week) is to do a software audit. All remote access licenses like Zoom and Citrix require licenses to be there or they won't let you use them. If anything 20-40% of our on site devices are off right now and no need to buy more hardware along with the licenses.
I think if anything our bill would be less now during a covid audit than last time.
"You know, with all the troubles that have come across my desk of late, the licence situation had completely slipped my mind"
"Yes we thought that might have been the case, and we are prepared to strike a new deal."
"Well now, let's have a look at our current levels of usage...yep, yep, and err, yep. I get it to about 20"
"Only twenty extra licences? Surely an organisation of your size has grown far more than the numbers you are telling us?"
"Sorry, I should have been more clear. We have furloughed nearly everyone and our original deal, that you have so kindly agreed to put to one side, for 5000 licences, needs replacing with a deal for 20 licences."
"Eh?"
"I assume the fees we have already paid will be reimbursed to our account by close of business today. Thank you for your call, and have a nice day"
Sure you're welcome to come and audit, but due to patient overrun, the server room is now a covid isolation room. Oh and we don't have any remote connections now due to the risk of ransom ware. We also have to ration our supplies of PPE and only critical staff get the good stuff. And sorry you don't count as critical.
But sure, come and do your audit. No problem.
We don't have time to pay for the gas in the ambulance because there is an emergency!! We should be getting the gas for free, don't you know how busy we are right now?
Just because software is less tangible & easier to steal than a physical item, that doesn't absolve the hospitals from paying for it.
Here is the difference: Chevron doesn't come around to your business measuring your gasoline (or petrol, if you prefer) consumption, demanding records of your consumption for the past year, and then back-charging you for any discrepancies. The gasoline is also not licensed to you under onerous, incomprehensible terms which unilaterally favor the seller. Software license audits are a time-consuming chore which put extra load on IT, and asking medical IT teams in particular to waste their time auditing their software consumption while under the stress of trying to manage the challenges of a newly-remote overloaded workforce is particularly egregious. If I were a hospital CIO or CTO, I would be sure to let the press know about the risks created by imposing an audit at this time and let the court of public opinion weigh in.
Thank you for that, you beat me to it. Enjoy a pint.
Got a business, any business being hounded by another company about software license audits in the middle of the pandemic? Hit social media & call them on it publicly. I wonder how badly their numbers will tank after the rest of their customers come forward to add their voices to the general uproar over the shitty nature of said actions...
Nobody says they should get the software without payment. They say the audit to make sure they didn't steal it should be postponed. Keep in mind that the hospitals are already paying for a bunch of licenses, so the companies are already getting quite a bit of money. I trust hospitals enough to pay any additional license fees, and I also trust them to have already done so in most cases. The audits are the difficult bit, and now is a really bad time to make people do that when those people are also saving lives.
As I see it, the companies have a couple of likely options. They could voluntarily relax their auditing requirements now and get a nice press release about it. Or they can not do that, get a bunch of stories like this printed in papers with a higher readership, and take the risk that people hate them. Or keep doing it after that and take the risk that a law is passed forcing them to relax their audit requirements, but no nice press release. Only one final option works out better for them, which is to hope that nobody else cares enough to write about the problem. Doesn't strike me as likely, but people ignore a lot of problems, so it might work.
EE have updated my ADSL router at least three times during the crises which I consider to be complete stupidity in the circumstances.
Not all of their customers will be capable or sorting out the mess for themselves when something goes wrong and they may be shielding or covid so no one will be able to enter their house to assist.
It was the best of audits, it was the worst of audits, it was the audit of wisdom, it was the audit of foolishness, it was the audit of belief, it was the audit of incredulity, it was the audit of Light, it was the audit of Darkness, it was the audit of hope, it was the audit of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to court, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest auditors insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Oracle is notorious for its byzantine and positively labyrinthine software licensing. It is so complex that from my experience very few at Oracle even understand.
As for IBM, I agree that it is a tad difficult but once you understand it, it is quite easy but very, very expensive.
Oracle is the standard by which all other licensing systems can be measured. Anything better than theirs is a positive thing.
Hmm, it's always seemed quite simple to me ... you can have everything you need, or even want, until you are reliant on it. Then you get the phone call saying they've collected your kids from school and if you ever want to see them again it will require £££. Then there will be an ongoing payment of an amount finely calculated to be the absolute maximum you can bear.
See also: borrowing money from the Mafia.
I want to say that Microsoft was (or still is) in the top five of "terrible licensing schemes", especially with some of their products. SQL Server is licensed by the core- not virtual cores if it's a VM, PHYSICAL cores. If your SQL server with 1 vCPU was running on a dual socket, 14 core processor with HT enabled, you'd have to buy 56 cores worth of licensing in order to use 1 of those cores with SQL server. Oh, it's SQL server enterprise edition? triple that cost, please.
Then there was the case of doing VDI, which as near as I could figure, required:
a license for the server that hyper-v was running on;
a license for the VM that hosted the VDI;
a license for the *client* to connect with it;
and a license for the RDP session to connect to the VDI instance. Yeah, 4 licenses in order to host a single VDI desktop. No Thank You.
You are mistaken with SQL core licenses:
You buy 2 core license packs (with IIRC a 4 core min). So, you can license a VM (4 core min) or you can license the host (4 core min)
You only license the Prod workloads, not Test / Dev etc too, so you can effectively run *some* SQL for free (but not for prod use, obvs!)
e.g.
Cluster of 2 nodes (12 cores per node), running 3 SQL VMs with 4 vCPUs each:
2 x 12 cores = 24 cores to be license = 12 "packs". You can then run any qty of SQL you want as you have licensed the host.
OR
3 x 4 core VMs = 12 cores = 6 license "packs". If you spin up another SQL VM, you pay for more packs. If any of the VMs are test/dev, they do NOT need to be licensed.
A handy guide to SQL licensing: (Alas, only as a Google chace version now)
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjFjPzmyJjuAhVRilwKHbsvAHEQFjAQegQIIRAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pass.org%2FEventDownload.aspx%3Fsuid%3D10873&usg=AOvVaw0rkZJ1JLAY3KV4CwzUmA4y
Some of Oracle's licences are by named person, that is a specific user and not their non-sick replacement which would require another license. Other licences are based on ever changing Oracle based voodoo estimate of cpu chip power with multicpu costing more. Other licences depend on who might use the results so if the public uses the results then 8 billion licenses. Oh yea, since you feel that the software is not perfect and need a development, test, and acceptance test databases all of those must be paid for separately.
Computer Associates used to be very very bad for licenses. They met Ross Perot of EDS and so on.
It makes MicroSloth method of counting licences / seats like paying a gas bill.
Hospitals would be attractive for software licensors as they are still open and, notoriously, working at capacity. An audit of software licenses of a shuttered business is more likely to find compliance -- the server and desktops might even be turned off.
It is the software licensee who does the grunt work of collecting the data for the audit. In a hospital context, the hospital's IT staff. An audit is not letting someone in the door and saying "hope your PPE is good", as delightful as that would be. The licensee's staff are safe, working from home, and writing e-mails with references to the contract clauses about software audit obligations.
The cost of an audit to the licensor is low. Basically an e-mail, some administration, and the customer relations staff giving a not-at-all-meant apology.
Whenever I have pressed a software vendor on their audit clauses the sales team have always responded that the clauses would be used "responsibly". That's clearly not the case.
Personally, a software licensor requiring a hospital to do a compliance audit in the midst of a pandemic would, in a better world, have the government solve that issue by issuing a statutory copyright license.
I was surprised to see SAP as being helpful.........
Almost all licensing is a pain in the understand and regulate if it is on a "trust model" however the the big outfits that will be pushing this are not exactly lacking in profits.
Whilst they are businesses and Healthcare may be a customer, like education it will be heavily discounted for some solutions so any additional revenues could be thin on the ground.
The looks more to be hitting the easy targets because public sector will generally bend of backwards to fulfil these audits as does not want to be hauled up for largescale licensing infringement or get hit with a bunch of vexatious FOI requests.
Surely you can just tell them to piss off? Do they actually have any right to enter your premises and perform an audit? Or take away valuable staff time to handhold vendors through the audit? Surely you can just say "too busy, go away", or some other excuse?
I used to work for an MSP, and customers would get audited occasionally and ask us to help, and it could take hours/days/weeks of stuffing around to track down licenses, work out staff counts etc, which the customer paid us for, and I doubt the vendor compensated them for.
i've absolutely no love for software vendors and their increasingly mob-like tactics on licensing, but this is surely pure sensationalism, isn't it?
Software audits are a fact of life. Have been for 20 years.
What precisely is it about the Covid crisis that prevents healthcare IT from having its house in order? I mean, sure, frontline healthcare workers are up against it, but IT workers? Come on.
To prevent disruption, non-essential IT projects will be on hold and people will be at a loose end. Sure, 9 months ago there was a rush to get everyone WFH, but now is the time to consolidate and validate if all those 'pragmatic' readings of licensing T&Cs that happened in the heat of April were prudent after all. Do it while you're still in the budgetary year and while that big Covid slush fund still appears on the finance guy's spreadsheet.
When the music stops on the Covid merri-go-round, those companies who've spent 12 months treading water making lame and infuriating 'because of covid' excuses will be in big trouble. Those who kept swimming like sharks will come out of this in much better shape.
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