its documented ... so its fact, right?

You'd expect that if its documented by the vendor, its correct. Of course. Why wouldn't you?

​But that's not always the case. It's not just customers who can get confused by vendor licensing, it happens to be themselves as well.

​And the issue is, if you don't find out before you get audited, its a whole lot harder to dispute than beforehand - those audit 'partners' will go by the rulebook, and that's their employers documented facts.
​So what does that mean? Well, a whole lot of work for someone to keep track of announcement letters, product rights, license information, terms, conditions, limitations ... constraints .... restrictions ..... and the list goes on.
​
​Not only do you need to keep current, you need to decipher what those facts mean - how do they translate to your situation? What are the implications?​

A recent example we identified had the complete removal of an existing metric (yep just plain gone) as published on the vendor public website, their licensing 'source of truth' no less. Now where would that leave you, the customer? Unlicensed ... unentitled? Common sense (and commercial practicality) says of course not, but then, that happens to become your argument (with those 'partners') - a time intensive, frustrating, unnecessary and - worse - potentially a futile exercise, unless you know what went wrong, 

and ...

what to argue.

On the plus side - you don't have to invest your organisations valuable time keeping track of this - we do it day in, and day out ... read the announcement letters, check the product rights, license information etc etc, so you don't have to. Just subscribe to our free notices at [email protected] and we'll send you updates as we uncover (and contest) them.