In order to effectively manage their software usage and to
mitigate compliance exposure, companies need to know how to gather
and analyze information regarding their product usage. While some
software products may have unique data-collection requirements that
ordinarily would not be applicable for other products, usage levels
for many products can be measured using a common set of reports
that companies can prepare themselves to gather. The purpose of
this and other posts in this series of blog entries is to give
companies insight regarding how to gather those datasets and why
that information is relevant to their licensing obligations.
The backbone of deployment data for many products is a list of
all devices in an IT environment capable of running or interacting
with a licensed software product. This inventory should include all
physical and virtual workstations and servers. In many cases, it
also should include devices like thin clients that may not be
capable of
