Companies ignoring software compliance

End user bodies are growing increasingly angry that businesses are being accused of having poor measures in place to monitor legal software use, saying users are being branded "cowboys".

The latest survey on software compliance claimed that over half of the technology professionals it interviewed admitted that their company does not have a formal programme in place.

Colin Bartram, co-founder of Vector Networks, which conducted the survey, explained that businesses are concerned about the cost of implementing software compliance programmes and the lack of visible return on investment.

"People expect that conducting software audits will cost them a lot of money and they are all a bit on the skint side," he said.

The Federation Against Software Theft (Fast) has warned that by not running a compliance programme, IT departments are missing out on the opportunity to save vast chunks of their IT budget.

They are also leaving themselves open to fines for software piracy.

The majority of companies which have implemented compliance programmes, either manually (54 per cent) or automatically (81 per cent), claim to have made savings.

Separate research conducted by analyst Aberdeen Group found that most large enterprises own approximately a third more IT related software and equipment than they believe they have or can account for.

The latest global piracy survey from the Business Software Alliance (BSA), published earlier this month, indicated that 26 per cent of business software used in the UK is illegal, up by one per cent on 2001.

But David Rippon, chairman of IT directors' forum Elite, downplayed the BSA figures, which are based on the difference between projected software licence sales and registered licences.

"I speak to a lot of IT directors and, in my experience, we are spending a lot of money making sure we're compliant because it's a legal thing," he said. "In fact companies will often over-licence to make sure they're compliant."

Rippon added that software providers should help users with the compliance issue by developing auditing capabilities in their products to make it easier for companies to track what they use.

"It is not easy to audit software and hardware," he explained. "Companies are spending a lot of money doing this and it irritates me when organisations like the BSA and Fast imply that we don't care and that we're a bunch of cowboys."