How To Use Software License Management

Transcription

1 Audit Defense: Level the Playing Field with Software License Management In a software audit there are often discrepancies between a company s actual compliance position and the compliance position produced by the auditor but the burden lies with the company to prove that its data is correct. This white paper outlines the most common differences in compliance positions, and how a company can use Software License Management to prove that its data is correct in order to effectively negotiate with the publisher on a level playing field.

2 Table of contents What Exactly is a Software Audit? 3 What is Audit-Ready Compliance? 3 Components of the Audit-Ready Compliance Process 4 Is Audit-Ready Compliance Easy to Do without a Software License Management Tool? 4 Why is Your Company Being Audited? 5 Essential Data to Become Audit-Ready 6 Layer 1: Commercial Data 6 Layer 2: Effective Licenses 7 Layer 3: Licensable Software Inventory 7 Layer 4: IT Architecture 7 Layer 5: Metrics and Effective Demand 7 Layer 6: Applying Licenses 8 Layer 7: Compliance Balance 8 Verification of the Data: Quality is Key! 8 During the Audit: Missing Licenses 9 The Perfect Defense: Missing Licenses 9 During the Audit: Over-Counting 10 The Perfect Defense: Over-Counting 10 The Auditor s Compliance Balance 10 The Perfect Defense: Auditor s Compliance Balance 11 A Successful Software Audit 11 Worksheet: Are You Ready for a Software Audit? 12 2/12

3 What Exactly is a Software Audit? A software audit occurs when a software publisher examines the use of their products onsite at a business to ensure that their intellectual property rights are not being infringed upon. Many publishers engage a third party auditing firm to complete the examination. As part of the audit process the auditor requests a multitude of license procurement and software usage data, and orders inspections to confirm the accuracy of the software usage reports. Frequently, the audit process means a substantial amount of unplanned work for companies. Time consuming analysis is necessary to create the required reports. It s common for full-time resources to be dedicated to the preparation and actual process of an audit for several months to a year before settlement with the publisher is reached. In many cases the auditor comes to the conclusion that the company in question is under-licensed and therefore infringing upon the license terms and conditions. Often the audited organization does not have the necessary processes or tools in place to verify the accuracy of the auditor s results, or to contest any discrepancies. As a result, the business must purchase additional licenses, often with back-dated maintenance at high percentages, leading to significant, unplanned expenses. Software License Management is a set of processes and tools put in place to give organizations a clear and simple view into their licenses, entitlements, and software contracts, and to bring transparency into software usage on employee devices and in the data center. The objective of Software License Management is hence to ensure both optimum procurement strategies and legal compliance. What is Audit-Ready Compliance? A software audit is about two factors: your data and the publisher s revenue. From the publisher s perspective, a successful audit equates getting as much revenue as possible out of the audit by finding under-licensed and non-compliant use of software. Once engaged in the audit, the publisher will exhaust all possibilities to increase the revenue he receives from it. A successful audit to you, the company, means you have Audit-Ready Compliance. Audit-Ready Compliance is: 1. Having the internal resources and processes in place to react to an audit; 2. Having the tools to support the internal resources and processes, check the quality of the data and process it, and produce preemptive compliance reports; 3. Being able to quickly and easily produce the required accurate data for an audit, which are documented and verifiable; 4. Assertively analyzing the auditor s results to check for missing records and errors (empowered by your own data); and 5. Negotiating from a position of knowledge and confidence until the numbers are corrected, confirmed, and agreed upon by all parties involved in the audit. As this white paper will demonstrate, Software License Management enables an organization to easily and proactively track its compliance position, while simultaneously empowering it with confirmable, high quality data, and the knowledge it needs to defend itself from audit requests and in an audit situation. Because " the worst mistake that an enterprise can [make] is to sit back and passively accept the audit terms, process and results." 1 Unless your organization has Audit-Ready Compliance a software audit will be expensive and disruptive to your business. The only way to achieve Audit-Ready Compliance, which is the best audit defense, is with Software License Management. [1] CIO.com How IT Departments Can Prepare for a Software License Audit. [online] Available at: [Accessed: 21 Jun 2013]. 3/12

4 Components of the Audit-Ready Compliance Process A software audit is a special situation in Software License Management. While license management requires its own resources and processes, a process to specifically respond to audit request letters and actual audits is a fundamental part of Audit-Ready Compliance. Although every publisher audit is somewhat different, the general procedure will be the same. Therefore, a company should set up an Audit-Ready Compliance Process Framework. This framework includes: - CMDBs for example: BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, USU Valumation - Procurement / Spend Management for example: Ariba, PeopleSoft, SAP - Reseller invoices and purchase reports - Contract Management Systems for example: Emptoris, Selectica The Software License Management Tool and internal compliance positions/reports; Roles and responsibilities for collecting license procurement, software usage and hardware data, and managing compliance; Tools the company uses to collect the respective required data, such as: - Discovery / Deep Scan for example: Altiris, ILMT, iquate, LANdesk, SCCM - Virtualization Managers and Directories for example: AD, Application Virtualization, Citrix, VMware A step by step audit handling procedure (See Aspera s webinar, A 10-Step Guide to Audit Defense); An approved external license expert and Software License Management Service provider to assist with cementing the data to defend the compliance position, and augment internal resources or lack thereof. Is Audit-Ready Compliance Easy to Do without a Software License Management Tool? The goal of an audit is to generate a compliance position or balance that compares the licenses owned by an organization against the software it s using. This is easier said than done. The complexity behind generating a compliance position is often underestimated. The misconception is that all you have to do is count license purchases and software installations, and then compare them to determine your position. software than the version stated in the purchase order. This is known as a Downgrade Right. Or the PUR may allow the company to install an additional copy of the software on a laptop or notebook used by the same person, known as the Right to a Secondary Copy. These oversights result in a huge amount of lost money on the side of the company when comparing licenses and purchases 1:1. The reality is more complicated than that. Before this comparison can take place the different data need to be processed and brought to a common ground so that they can be matched. Simply counting license purchases ignores the fact that one purchase record can entitle a company to more than one software product. This kind of license is called a bundle. Moreover, there are Product Use Rights (PUR) in the licenses that entitle the company to do certain things with the software. For instance, the PUR may entitle the company to use earlier versions of the Likewise, if a company only tracks software installations it is not collecting enough information to withstand a software audit. The license metric plays an integral role in measuring license demand. Server metrics are rarely just installation-based. Named User, PVUs, and Processor-based are just a few examples of metrics that are not installation based. Consequently, the installation record is not enough to figure out how many licenses you need to cover the installation. The nature of the metrics is complicated and not always straightforward to interpret, especially for large organizations with vast data centers and complex IT architectures. 4/12

5 The limitations of only counting purchases and installations often lead to overlooking entitlements and over-counting software usage and license demand, which in turn lead to a costly exaggeration of an organization s non-compliance. Therefore, to have a successful software audit an organization needs to have insight into its license terms and conditions, metrics, and relevant aspects of its IT architecture in order to avoid these miscalculations. Software License Management Tools are specifically designed to consolidate and process the incongruous data, fill in the missing pieces such as Product Use Rights and metric calculations, and highlight holes in the required data so these can be targeted and resolved. Thus, a license management tool brings transparency to the data by accurately representing the organization s entitlements, license demand, and compliance position. Why is Your Company Being Audited? Audits are time consuming and very expensive, as the data suggests. The publisher knows this, so he won t make this investment unless he believes there is a good chance that auditing your company will bring a return on the investment.. As Rob Pink, National Service Network Leader at KPMG Contract Compliance Services explains from a 2013 KPMG survey of 31 software companies representing more than 50 percent of the revenue in the software industry, "Our survey finds that software license compliance programs rarely result in negative resolutions such as litigation or loss of a customer, making these revenue-producing programs a low-risk proposition for publishers." 2 The survey goes on to show that, "the top challenge customers face in achieving license compliance is complex and difficult-to-understand metrics, followed closely by virtualized environments that are difficult to track and report on." In effect, publishers are capitalizing on customers vulnerability regarding understanding complex metrics and lack of license management tools and processes to combat the risk. The results of an Ernst & Young UK survey of eight major software publishers paint a similar picture. According to the survey results, the number one reason publishers audit their customers is to generate revenue, as shown in the graph below. 70% Objectives Of Publishers Compliance Programs 3 60% 50% 40% 30% 63% 50% 50% 38% 38% 20% 10% 0% Generate revenue Develop a baseline Protect intellectual property rights Internal governance/ controls Improve customer processes/ Encourage SAM adoption/ Education 25% Anti-piracy 13% Customer satisfaction [2] KPMG LLP Unlicensed Software Losses Remain Major Problem, Even as Companies Recover More Revenue, According to KPMG Survey. [press release] October 1, [3] Unknown Software compliance without tears. [e-book] United Kingdom: p. 1, 3, and 4. Available through: Ernst & Young LLP, 1 More London Place, London, SE1 2AF $FILE/IT%20COMPLIANCE%20WITHOUT%20TEARS.pdf [Accessed: June 19, 2013]. 5/12

6 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 75% How Publishers Choose Who to Audit 4 50% 50% 30% 20% 10% 0% Inconsistencies in purchasing behavior Been caught non-compliant in the past Company size 25% Organizational changes (e.g. M&A) 13% Organizational complexity (e.g. number of countries operating in) Ernst & Young writes in their evaluation, "The survey results confirm that software audits are increasingly becoming a way of life for both customers and vendors End users need to get a grip on their software estate so as to minimize the time and resources dedicated to audits and any subsequent penalties for non-compliance." As the graph above shows, the majority of vendors look for audit candidates based on inconsistencies in the customer s purchasing behavior. And if your company has been caught non-compliant in the past, this also increases your chances of an audit. If you think a large organization has a lower risk of being audited because publishers do not want to jeopardize the customer relationship, then think again. Audits of any kind are about revenue, not relationships. Company size is a factor publishers consider when choosing who to audit. It s safe to say that the larger the company, the more audit risk it faces simply because the investment in software is so substantial. Essential Data to Become Audit-Ready The data required to withstand a software audit are complicated and multi-layered. Below we will drill down to each layer and examine its complexities. Layer 1: Commercial Data The outermost layer your commercial records deals with license purchases. You need to know which licenses your company purchased, when, how many, and which business unit owns them. Most procurement/spend management tools only address this outer layer. However, as pointed out earlier in this paper, simply counting license purchases is not enough to protect a company in a software audit. Moreover, the auditor requires more data than this. This means that someone in the organization must read the purchase contracts, make note of the licenses and associated metrics acquired thereunder, and then manually record the Product Use Rights, maintenance terms and dates, and license transfers within the organization. Moreover, this work must be repeated for de-centrally acquired licenses. However important it is to know what s written in software licenses, rarely does this position exist in an organization. [4] Unknown Software compliance without tears. [e-book] United Kingdom: p. 1, 3, and 4. Available through: Ernst & Young LLP, 1 More London Place, London, SE1 2AF [Accessed: June 19, 2013]. 6/12

7 Layer 2: Effective Licenses Beyond the actual procurement of licenses, an audit requires deeper knowledge specifically what s actually written in the license terms and conditions (and overlying contracts). This next layer is about answering the following questions: Is it a base license, an update license, or a pure maintenance license? Does the overlying contract, base or update license entitle you to maintenance? What do the Product Use Rights allow? What is the license metric? When the answers to these questions are known, then the organization has identified its Effective License Position. Layer 3: Licensable Software Inventory The third layer moves from the commercial data to the technical data, which is the software inventory. Creating the software inventory is more difficult than it seems. While gathering software installation data may mean writing a script to collect executable files, hundreds of thousands of records are produced. This is a technical software inventory, because many of data points are irrelevant from a licensing standpoint (such as patches and hotfixes). Furthermore, software suites are difficult to recognize in lists of individual installation records. These factors make it difficult to create an accurate inventory of licensable software without a specialized license management tool. Discovery tools should not soley be relied on to create an inventory of licensable software, as these technologies are designed to scan for all software components, many of which are irrelevant to the licensing position and in an audit situation. Raw discovery data should not be given to the auditor, because these reports contain more than the necessary information and may lead to unnecessary discrepancies. Layer 4: IT Architecture The next layer represents the IT architecture. The following are just some examples of the questions that need to be answered: Who or what business unit owns the machines on which the software is running? How is the hardware configured? How is the IT architecture designed? For instance, is the software running on a hard partitioned virtual server or on server in a cluster? On which platform is the software running? How is the software used? Which applications are running on top of what server software? This information, in turn, is relevant to the Product Use Rights and vital for certain metric calculations. Layer 5: Metrics and Effective Demand Now the company must assess how many licenses it needs to cover its usage of the software. This is known as metric calculations. The metric is one reason why simply tracking your license purchases in Ariba, PeopleSoft, or in Excel Spreadsheets is not enough. The business needs to know the actual contents of the licenses because the metric and the publisher s calculation rules are defined therein. In this layer the goal is to use the metric to calculate how many licenses the business needs to cover its usage of the software. The result of the metric calculations is called Effective Demand. Server software license metrics are notoriously difficult to calculate because they take various factors such as hardware details, configuration, platform, and virtualization into consideration leading to complex algorithms that involve several types of data. Some publishers even offer the option to choose from alternative metrics. This means there can be several metric calculation results for the same software usage, and some results are more favorable to the organization s compliance position than others. Consider the data you need to make sense of Oracle metrics: Database instance name Server status Installed software Processor model Number of processors or used sockets Database options Total amount of processor cores Server hardware partition Number of named users Database management packets Metrics Manually doing the calculations for the hundreds of metrics for server software would require specialized knowledge about each license and a significant amount of time, is error prone and expensive (in terms of resources). 7/12

8 Layer 6: Applying Licenses This next layer of information to ensure Audit-Ready Compliance requires an organization to assign update and maintenance licenses to base licenses, and apply the Product Use Rights so that the license position is accurate and license demand is not exaggerated. To apply the Product Use Rights correctly and determine which update and maintenance licenses should be married to what base licenses requires an understanding of the software usage and the device ownership. Additionally, the assignment of update and maintenance licenses to base licenses is important because the auditor may follow guidelines stipulating that if there are any "holes" in the update or maintenance chain of a longstanding license then the current usage of the license may not be considered compliant. Layer 7: Compliance Balance Finally, the core layer is applying the Effective License Position to the Effective Demand. The result of this comparison is the business compliance balance. As you can see, the crucial data for Audit-Ready Compliance is multi-faceted, and there are many not always easy to decipher conclusions a company needs to draw from it. Not coincidentally, these data requirements are exactly the same for Software License Management. Therefore, a specialized tool is specifically designed to overcome the challenges in the data, and enable the company to quickly and confidently produce the required accurate data for a software audit and draw the right conclusions. Verification of the Data Quality is Key! Aside from being able to produce the required accurate data, one of the key aspects in a software audit is being able to check the quality of the data and confirm the results. High quality data means airtight audit defense and better decisions! If there are discrepancies between your company s internal compliance position and the compliance position produced by the auditor, the burden lies with you to prove that your data is correct. And, as this paper will demonstrate, there will inevitably be differences in the compliance positions. In order to prove that your data is correct, you need to have data quality checks in place. The best defense in this case is a Software License Management Tool, because it tracks data quality, making weaknesses in the data transparent to the organization and empowering it to pro-actively improve the data and optimize its processes, if necessary. The Software License Management Tool should have data quality gateways built-in to protect the integrity of the imported and processed data. This does not mean log files. The tool should have complete Data Quality Management (DQM) features permanent and automated quality checks and reports. At a minimum, the data you produce for an audit while using this tool should follow a process that you can transparently retrace for the auditor from raw data to metric calculations, to Effective License Position and applying Product Use Rights. Other DQM features include: An Import Success Tracker that reports on the percentage of the supplied data that has been correctly loaded into the system and processed. The Import Success Tracker should clearly mark why the other records could not be processed to save the user the effort of having to sift through log files and enable him to efficiently resolve the issue(s); Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as the clearing success of procurement data to measure the coverage of captured incoming licenses, the recognition rate of raw software inventory data to create the licensable software inventory, and the rate of assigned vs. unassigned update and maintenance licenses; A warning system when the tool encounters missing, corrupt, or incompatible data. For instance, when information required to perform a metric calculation is missing. With Data Quality Management measures it s possible to pro-actively improve the data quality and confirm the reliability of the compliance position, effectively defending the organization s position in an audit. Being able to prove the high quality of an organization s data is especially important when it comes to verifying the auditor s data, as you will see in the following chapter. 8/12

9 During the Audit: Missing Licenses In an audit, it s common practice for the auditor to give the audited organization a report of its purchasing history from the publisher. For Microsoft it s called the Microsoft Licensing Statement (MLS). For IBM it s the FastPass or Passport Advantage Online reports. In principle, the report shows all the licenses a company owns from that particular publisher. The reality is different. Remember: the worst thing a company can do is "sit back and passively accept" what the auditor presents. These reports are usually incomplete because they only contain certain types of license acquisitions. For instance, in an IBM audit, the auditor s purchase report will not contain acquisitions made outside of IBM s Passport Advantage. This means embedded licenses, licenses acquired under Passport Advantage Express, Enterprise Licensing Agreements (ELAs), Complete Enterprise Options (CEOs), and (International) Enterprise Software & Service Options (ESSOs/iESSOs) will not be there. The auditor s reports for Microsoft audits often do not contain System Builder Licenses, or licenses acquired through Open Agreements. Frequently these purchase reports also do not contain licenses that a company purchased from a business acquired by the publisher but before the products were integrated into the publisher s product line. Certain licenses transferred within the organization or attained by the organization through M&As also may be missing from the report. And any locally acquired licenses will not be the auditor s report either. But how can a business prove this to the auditor? The answer is through Software License Management, which, as this paper has shown, gathers and consolidates licenses throughout the enterprise, across the various contracts and procurement methods, and produces a complete report of the company s license ownership. The Perfect Defense: Missing Licenses The Effective Licenses report is standard in a catalog-based Software License Management Tool. The tool s Master Catalog contains the publisher s unique article or stock keeping unit (SKU) number and each license s Product Use Rights. When the SKU number is part of the purchase record then the tool can automatically recognize license purchases, normalize and record the commercial data, and assign the correct Product Use Rights. To ensure a complete and accurate representation of a company s Effective Licenses, all purchases whether central or local must find their way to the license management tool. The tool also tracks license changes such as upgrades, downgrades, moves, ownership transfers, and splits. Additionally, most license management tools have a feature to attach the original proof of purchase or link to it, if the document is filed in an external system. This means that even 5, 10, or 20 years after the license was bought, a company is still able to quickly locate the proof of purchase and show a complete chain of updates to the base license over time. This is why it s important to have Software License Management. Then you are able to check the auditor s report for completeness and accuracy. If you find discrepancies you can produce the proof of entitlement at the click of a button, and thereby prove to the auditor exactly which licenses are missing in the report. The first SKU catalog was introduced by Aspera in Although SKUs are very important, there s more to a Master Catalog. At Aspera we have a Content Team whose job is to supplement the SKUs with the license T s & C s and related Product Use Rights. This is how our tool, SmartTrack, knows how to automatically assemble the Effective License Position. 9/12

10 During the Audit: Over-Counting As your company is required to submit software usage and inventory data to the auditor, the first set of technical data you need is an inventory of the licensable software installed on your machines. To assist with the audit process the publisher usually recommends a free tool or gives you scripts to help you collect the required data. But the results provided by these tools and scripts often produce more than the required data and have errors in them that lead to overcounting. For example, IBM s LMT relies on a database of signatures. However, due to dependencies between the different hardware platforms to which software signatures can be assigned, adding multiple recognition signatures for the same application can produce inaccurate results. For instance, if you assign recognition_signature_1 to the UNIX platform and recognition_signature_2 to the HP-UX platform, and assign them both to Application XYZ, the ILMT will report the software as installed twice on the HP-UX system. Other issues in the data that lead to over-counting include ghost installs (false positives), incomplete product names (e.g. missing edition), wrong product/edition, high watermarks, and counting deactivated cores. The Perfect Defense: Over-Counting A company should not submit inventory data to the auditor without first reviewing it. This is where the Master Catalog in a catalog-based Software License Management tool comes in handy in processing the data. A Software License Management Tool can assist you and process the data. The catalog contains signatures and recognition rules enabling it to differentiate between individual installations and suites, and automatically processing the raw scan data into an inventory of licensable software, complete with full product names and editions. Without a license management tool to sift out irrelevant data, normalize the relevant data, and match installations to licensable software, checking the data for errors could take up a full-time resource and is prone to human oversight. During an audit your company is under time constraints, and mistakes in the data could potentially cost millions in over-counting. A Software License Management Tool gives you the power to identify mistakes in the software inventory that can lead to over-counting the Effective Demand. With this information you have the best defense to show the auditor that you are compliant, or that your underlicensing is not significant. The license management tool must be transparent. The user should be able to trace each step of the process from the raw scan data to the final licensable software results, and see the recognition rules in the Master Catalog. These»Explain Features«are key if the auditor challenges your data, because you need to be able to clearly explain how you got your results and why they are correct. The Auditor s Compliance Balance When it comes to matching the licenses and applying Product Use Rights to the licensable software inventory to get the compliance balance, it is worth considering that auditors are human, and like everyone they make mistakes. Whether it is missing bundle rules or not applying failover, standby, testing, or clustering rules, these things happen especially because the auditor is most likely manually assembling the results. And, as this paper previously explains, keeping track of and applying the Product Use Rights is easier said than done. The auditor may also follow particular guidelines, such as not including ownership of maintenance, or update licenses without proof of the base license. In the end, the auditor s compliance balance must be reviewed. 10/12

11 The Perfect Defense: Auditor s Compliance The best defense against a flawed compliance balance is to compare it to the company s internal compliance balance. A Software License Management Tool helps to recognize potential errors and opportunities to improve the license position. The compliance balance generated automatically by the tool may reveal licenses previously not considered. If the company is using multi-metric products, then applying licenses with a different metric may eradicate under-licensing. The tool will enable the company to try out different license metrics to evaluate the best licensing situation, and empower the company to argue against the auditor s possibly less favorable application of alternative metrics. A Successful Software Audit Having the ability to review the auditor s processes and results is the best defense in an audit and a catalogbased Software License Management Tool enables an enterprise to do this. If you are able to demonstrate that your company has control of and governance over license compliance, then you re making a powerful statement to the publisher. There are a number of levels on which the auditor s results can be negotiated to improve/correct the company s compliance position. For instance, if there were inconsistencies with the software inventory due to wrong editions or incorrect product names. The company should test how correcting these discrepancies would affect the compliance balance. If these corrections lead to a major change in the final results, then these are convincing arguments to get the auditor s results corrected in the company s favor. These examples are just a few of the areas in which a tool empowers the enterprise to defend itself in an audit with complete and accurate data. Even if you re already engaged in an audit right now, a 100% web-based Software License Management Tool can start processing and interpreting the data immediately and accurately. And, if you re able to handle the audit with poise, speed, knowledge about your environment and negotiate from a position of strength then your chances of being audited in the future will go down. That s why Software License Management is the perfect audit defense. Who knows, maybe a publisher will refrain from auditing your company if he finds out you have Software License Management in place. It wouldn t be the first time. 11/12

12 Worksheet: Are You Ready for a Software Audit? To help you evaluate if your company would benefit from Software License Management use the worksheet below. For each category enter the appropriate number. Strong disagreement corresponds to 1, general disagreement to 2, and slight disagree to 3. Strong agreement corresponds to 6, general agreement to 5 and slight agreement to 4. There is no option for neutrality because this is not an accurate response to any of the statements in the worksheet. Add up your your score when you are finished to interpret your results. Statement Disagree Agree Our license management process is unclear and/or there are no clear roles and responsibilities for compliance. We are not able to assign license purchases to their corresponding Product Use Rights. Our software inventory requires more insight into the exact licensable product, so we can accurately track our license demand. We are not able to generate device topologies to show virtualization scenarios, clusters, and host device/virtual machine relationships. It is difficult for us to find out which applications are running on top of which server software. It would be impossible to calculate all the license metrics we have with the tools/data available to us. Many of our licenses do not have histories, so tracing back to the original base license after transfers and updates is very difficult. We already use most or all of the capabilities of our existing toolset. Our data quality management is highly manual e.g. scouring log files. We struggle to gather the data needed to prepare for decisions that our IT and procurement teams need to make. We are not able to compare licenses to our software usage, and apply the Product Use Rights to exhaust the value of our software assets. We are not generating internal compliance balances to minimize our audit risk. Total Score Results: If you scored under 36 your organization is ready for a software audit and will be able to defend itself. If you scored 37 60, your organization is moving in the right direction and should consider getting started with a Software License Management Tool very soon. If you scored more than 60 your organization is not ready for a software audit. But that doesn t mean that you can t get ready. You should consider evaluating your company s need for Software License Management. 12/12

13 For more information and to arrange a private introduction to Aspera and our software license management solution, please contact: info@aspera.com Aspera Technologies Inc. 470 Atlantic Avenue, 4th Floor Boston, MA USA Phone Fax Aspera GmbH Dennewartstrasse Aachen, Germany Germany Phone Fax