Enterprises Face Barrage of Software Audits - Page 2

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Iteration confusion

Gartner's Cosgrove said ensuring software compliance is not as easy as it sounds. "When you buy a particular product, there could be 15 to 20 iterations of its name," he explained. "You could have Microsoft Office with different product keys or different service packs, or different versions of Office."

Microsoft bought Asset Metrix in 2006, and that provides a cloud service for software inventory.

The service tells customers the different naming conventions used for software, and customers can store that data in their database and compare its inventory against that, Cosgrove said.

The dominant player in this space is Bit9, which has more than 6 billion records in its Global Software Registry product, Tom Murphy, the company's company chief marketing officer, told InternetNews.com.

Bit9's software-discovery application, Bit9 Parity, finds out what's installed on an enterprise's laptops, desktops and servers, and white lists applications by running them against the Global Software Registry.

White listing is an approach in which an enterprise draws up a list of approved applications it will run, and everything else is not allowed in.

Another player in software-license compliance is LANDesk, which Avocent (NASDAQ: AVCT) bought two years ago.

Appliances are a problem in the larger enterprises LANDesk serves because "they limit users to their capabilities and reduce flexibility," Robert Naegle, LANDesk's vice president of marketing, told InternetNews.com.

LANDesk makes the Management Gateway appliance, a pizza box server that sits outside the corporate firewall and creates Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-encrypted connections to core services.

This is for companies managing users' mobile devices, Naegle said.