UK companies are neglecting software compliance as Major UK firms are unaware of the fact that whether the business software used by them are conforming international standards or not.
Major UK firms are unaware of the fact that whether the business software used by them are conforming international standards or not, despite the possibility of financial penalties & criminal charges which can be faced by companies that do not monitor software installed in their computers, as per Centennial Software's latest research.
71 % of IT (Information Technology) managers from firms in healthcare, logistics, finance & retail sectors claim that they don't know whether their software is compliant or not or just ignore the software's current status. Without the knowledge of software being installed on their computers, companies can also suffer from high costs because of over-licensing, high prices per unit due to decentralized purchasing & unused maintenance license agreements.
Recently, BBC implemented a tool for software auditing and discovered that it was giving license fees for over 3,000 computers, though only 300 computers were actually using that software.
Companies like Microsoft have active piracy audits and there's no excuse for companies ignoring the risks, as per Alex Hilton, Centennial's vice-president for UK sales.
Compliance gap still exists despite 85 % of firms were aware of software asset management (SAM) targets like ISO 19770 international standard. As per the study, 7 out of 10 IT managers overlook this standard despite approval in May 2006 by the govt. Also, 69 % of respondents were yet to take necessary actions like conducting timely piracy audits to attain compliance.
"For quite some time now, piracy has been the undoing of the software industry in almost all the Eastern European countries. It has considerably slowed down the growth of the sector," as per the report "Eastern European Software Industry: Present and Future" published by RNCOS.
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