Software companies are making it difficult for IT departments to buy legitimate software.

IT directors have told Computer Weekly that there is a lack of direction or guidelines from software publishers to enable buyers to track software compliance. Suppliers are unable to give users a clear answer as to how many licences they require.

An audit that reveals a shortfall in authorised licences, or where the organisation is found to have purchased the wrong licence, can lead to large fines and hefty excess licence charges.

Writing recently on the Constellation Research blog, analyst Ray Wang warned that software publishers use the threat of running a software audit to drive customers to buy more licences: "Audits are used to start the discussion. Unsuspecting customers who no longer have context about the original contract may fear breach of contract."

Software publishers want to sell organisations an enterprise agreement, according to James Moy, assistant vice-president for IT asset management at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. "They love to sell their software, but if you ever ask any of the software vendors how they keep compliant on their own software, they will have no response," he said.

Moy said most software is coded with executable file and revisions. "How does a user or company actually count? Take into account upgrades, patch versioning, enterprise agreements and select agreements, and your head is spinning," he added.

Virtualisation licensing prohibitively complex Job site Reed.co.uk switched back from virtualisation to physical servers, because it was cheaper and easier to understand, from a licensing perspective. "Virtualisation was quite [challenging]," said Mark Ridley, director of technology at Reed.co.uk. "We were scaling virtual machines, but we reverted back to physical boxes because the [software] licences were clearer and simpler." He said that running the Reed.co.uk website on larger physical boxes was cheaper than using virtualisation. Licensing issues was also one of the reasons Reed.co.uk opted for Google Apps over Office 365. "We think Office 365 is a great product, but when we looked at the Office 365 E3 licensing [scheme], the fine print stated you weren't allowed to use it on virtual desktops," said Ridley. The Microsoft licensing limitations did not fit with Reed.co.uk's desktop visualisation strategy, so Microsoft lost out. Part of the problem dealing with Microsoft was that each product family had its own sales rep, and often the different product divisions will have conflicting licensing agreements, he said. "It would be fantastic if you only needed to talk to one person instead of someone from the Office group or SQL Server group separately. Microsoft needs to ensure it is simpler to understand. To buy Microsoft [software today], you probably need an MS specialist." When we looked at Office 365 E3 licensing, the fine print stated you weren't allowed to use it on virtual desktops Mark Ridley, Reed.co.uk