Trusted advisors defending and reducing your audit risks
“Organizations have about a 65% chance of being audited by at least one software vendor each year” – Gartner
Receiving an audit notification is only a matter of time. We know that an organization’s readiness to respond to an audit takes more than having licenses on hand; it also includes your prior audit experience, learnings and outcomes, vendors audit approaches, IT resource availability and IT infrastructure changes. All of this could be stressful, especially if the organization is not sufficiently familiar with the licensing rules, IT estate and the audit process.
At Proteam, we have been on both sides of the fence. We are experts in software audits, with over 100+ years of collective experience in working with major software publishers. Our deep insights into their audit methodologies and tactics, translate into significant reduction in audit risks and savings to our customers.
We have successfully defended clients during different phases of an audit process – Pre audit due diligence, support during an ongoing audit, Post report generation and during negotiations.
Our 3-step process allows you to defend against upcoming audits on your terms.
Planning and readiness are keys to success before responding to an audit letter. First, we understand your legal rights and obligations, current SAM environment (people, process, technology), communicate with your key stakeholders and devise a detailed audit plan before responding to an audit letter
Understanding your IT estate incorporates a number of key elements. Proteam’s support across these functions will ensure your organization is prepared as best as possible for the audit and resulting assessment report.
We start by performing a deep dive through all your agreements, purchase orders, invoices and reseller records to find missing entitlements, including metric changes and product migrations. Then we validate what is deployed and used. If required, we validate vendor records by reperforming your deployment analysis to uncover errors (counting false positives, uninstalled software, etc.).
Third step is to either calculate or validate vendor compliance table by applying licensing rules accurately. Finally, we apply all possible usage rights such as cross grades, downgrades, bundles and upgrades to cover any shortfalls and generate future savings
We support you throughout the process and negotiate with the vendor on your behalf. With all the facts on hand, we can highlight their errors and negotiate confidently. While negotiating its import ant to understand factors like settlement timing, accuracy of vendor findings, future software plans and actual usage of the application