Licence Management is regularly highlighted as being the number one IT concern for many organisations. The subject is frequently challenging and will always be administration intensive touching areas such as negotiation, buying, builds, software deployment, contract, legal, reporting, document management and more. At ITAMS we believe that there are five basic issues that all need to be addressed to regain and keep control of your licensing position:     • • • • • Controlling your purchases and building up a historical proof of purchases and a licence net position Collecting good quality information on what licensable software is deployed Defining good processes on software moves and changes and dealing with software packaging and deployment Managing licence entitlement including the complexities of licensing terms and establishing licence pooling and harvesting Performing reconciliation of deployed / consumed software vs. entitlement     The common denominator for all these challenges is a trusted licence entitlement repository with underpinning procurement workflow and supplier contracts. The licence repository is used to capture historical and new licence entitlement with the associated proof of purchase and the details of the licence. This data can then be reconciled with data coming from the Discovery tool to produce a net compliance position on most common products / licence types. The tool will also allow licence pooling to be used, such that if there are licences available these will be used in preference to triggering a new purchase. Finding the right solution can prove to be a challenge mainly due the immaturity of the entitlement tool market and the types of system available either of the database (simple) or workflow-database (advanced) variety. We can give you a truly independent assessment of the few mature tools available on the market and help you improve your processes and to ultimately reach a level of licence management that meets your business risk threshold requirements.