Mastering Software License Compliance - Episode 8

And so I always like to start, I tell my team all the time, you know, what ends up happening a lot of the times is these elps get created because you've been audited. And I'm going to talk about two of my first audits that I did in different scenarios. One was at my time when I was at Microsoft and I was a licensing specialist and we had an account that was audited. Microsoft brought in a top four accounting firm to audit this client. And they presented findings to the Microsoft account team and the client that were in the mid seven figures. Like this was high mid, you know, high seven figures of shortfall. And the account team took that and actually forecasted the revenue. And then, you know, I got, as the license specialist, I just provided the LP and I actually reviewed it and I told the account team not to forecast the deal at all because I didn't believe that the compliance issue was there. We're going to get into why that is. But, you know, basically what ended up happening was the account team forecasted this, then the 18 months of bitter negotiation with a client that was really upset with them and ended up settling for the low for low six figures.