Multicore processors are standard in enterprise server platforms. And, the changes in multicore licensing counts can have a serious ripple effect on a company’s budget, increasing licensing costs by 25 to 50 to 100 percent or more at any given time. However, on the flip side, multicore can also become a source of major savings in licensing costs and bring a bigger “bang for the buck” as well as added value to any purchased licenses.

Multicore essentially builds additional core processing capabilities into a single physical processor. In most cases performance has proven to be better than an equivalent number of single core processors. Over the years, the industry has moved way beyond the dual-core processor, offering quad (four) and hexa (six) core processor technology. Dual and quad-core processors are probably still the most common today, but some manufacturers have processors that contain up to eight cores. Software vendors that base their pricing per processor have had to revise their calculations for determining license requirements when involving servers with multicore processors.

Just because you can put workloads in the cloud doesn’t always mean that you should. License compliance is often an afterthought in the race to the cloud to get solutions that are faster, cheaper, and considered better by not only IT but also the business. The insatiable growth of shadow IT combined with the limited ability to calculate true usage across hybrid environments – often leaves a significant gap and risk from license compliance. As Asset Managers, you are in the unique position to be the change agent to help address and reduce the risk of shadow IT to the company.

Cloud solutions have taken a similar pathway to virtualization: first, hitting sprawl and then a period of stall while companies figure the best way to contain and gain benefit from their investments in this area. Unlike virtualization, the cloud-based solutions will be harder to reign in due to the proliferation of more technically savvy workers combined with cloud solutions being more readily available. Cloud sprawl due to shadow IT often turns the job of the Asset Manager into the primary player in a game of whack-a-mole – trying to understand what applications are installed where and what the agreement terms are.

Cloud sprawl has become a common theme for many companies as the adoption of cloud solutions has outpaced information technologies ability to keep up. In my book iSpeak Cloud, interviewees reported anywhere from 164-300+ applications that were discovered in cloud audits but unknown to Information Technology. The negative ramifications for companies have included everything from being millions per month over their budget for usage of 3rd party cloud solutions like Amazon to being out of compliance with regulatory, corporate or business directives. There were many unknown implications that were not considered such as increased Internet service provider costs and applications licensed for on-premise-only utilization being accessed over hybrid cloud environments.

The vast majority of enterprise customers I speak with these days are very interested in Microsoft’s Office 365 offering, many are already in the process of evaluation or deployment, or have already deployed it. Office 365 is a subscription based productivity offering from Microsoft which does not offer the option to obtain a perpetual license. There is no doubt Office 365 is reaching a point of critical mass…