Cattle Dog's Future

It is with some regret that I must announce that Cattle Dog Pty Ltd will no longer be offering IT/Software Asset Management services or products for sale in Australia. The business has not had the success we would have liked it to have, and of necessity have had to pursue opportunities outside of it.

Anthony has gone on to work with Microsoft's licensing division, and we wish him the best of luck.

Yolanda and Måns worked with us part-time, and have more time now for other opportunities.

Christine and myself are taking on contract roles, currently I am working at a large investment bank.

Do your software licenses make you a vendor-slave?

Techdirt has an interesting post tying together two separate stories that point out some of the more critical gotchas in software licensing.

“In both cases, the companies providing the licenses recognized (correctly) that this allowed them a tremendous amount of leverage in any future contract negotiation, since they could (literally, in some cases) lock up their customers' most important assets. For companies buying technology products who think things like the details of intellectual property law and licenses don't matter, perhaps these stories will make them a little more aware of a few of the reasons why it's important to understand what you license and what you own -- and recognizing that you never want to trust your most important assets to an outside vendor.”

In one story an automated parking station lost the ability to move customers' cars around, and in the other a health service provider lost access to patient data.

On a sidenote, does your BCP take account of the potential effect of your software vendors not being available to renew/replace your software license keys should a disaster cause you to move to a new location?

New License Report Service

One of the new services we are now offering is an on-site appraisal of how well your organisation is managing software licenses. Many executives and directors are aware that they need to comply with the terms of their software licenses or face possible criminal charges, but have not yet taken the steps required to ensure compliance and properly manage the risks and costs involved.

Our on-site appraisal of your license management processes and controls, allows us to identify potential areas of non-compliance risk, and benchmark your organisation against current best practices. We are offering this analysis and written report to our clients for only $880.

For more information check our new license report page.

del.icio.us tags:

• software
• licenses
• SAM
• service
• value

OffTopic: Don't trust vendors

Iain Ferguson blogs that corporate IT should not trust vendors' use of new terms such as Business Intelligence (BI). Few IT people would be surprised by this, the dilution of many terms through use in marketing hype is well known. Terms that are commonly recognised as diluted include; Business Intelligence (BI), Knowledge Management (KM), Self Healing, 360 degree view of your customer and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

In many cases terms are diluted to help mutton dress up as lamb. A document storage solution is declared to offer first document management, and then as sales dry up, it is spruiked as knowledge management (perhaps with the addition of a few more meta tags). This rebirthing of old solutions is sometimes an interim measure as the vendor comes up with a real knowledge management solution, but more often than not it is simply marketers jumping on the latest buzzword bandwagon.

Sounds harmless, right? Well it would be, if it was not used to avoid actually delivering what the customer really wanted. As Iain points out:

Your writer wonders how many customers have been suckered over the past few years into thinking they were implementing a BI solution when they were actually getting a rebranded query and reporting toolset.

It’s a sad fact of life that ICT suppliers are desperately eager to coin new terms and shamelessly redefine them as they go in an effort to shift more equipment or services.

The IT/Software Asset Management (IT/SAM) industry is as guilty of this as any, the use of the term Self Healing being a good example of hype in action (it usually just means the automatic application of software patches).

The whole ethos of Cattle Dog is opposed to this sort of buzzword claiming, yet I'm sure there is some of our marketing material that may claim association with buzzwords unnecessarily. If you doubt something we say in our marketing material, please mention it to me at angus@cattle-dog.com.au.

Angus McDonald
Principal, Cattle Dog Pty Ltd

del.icio.us tags:

• buzzwords
• OffTopic
• vendors
• ethics
• CattleDog

del.icio.us

We've been updating the Round Up! blog recently, and one of the niftier features we've added is categorising our posts using del.icio.us tags. Each post is tagged with one or more single word tags, and added to our del.icio.us list, which automatically gives us the green list of tags in the right-hand column.

The "Best of Round Up!" links will remain as a way of highlighting important information that might not be amongst our more popular tags. However, the tags menu will allow you to quickly find related posts and filter for those posts that you are really interested in.

del.icio.us tags:

• Web2.0
• tagging
• blogs
• CattleDog
• RoundUp