IBM Cognos Licensing Audit – Steps For Compliance

A Cognos Licensing audit for any software can become a very stressful time for administrators as they scramble to provide information and pray they are in compliance.  Below are a few steps to help ensure that you are in compliance if IBM Cognos decides to audit you.

1. Call your IBM Cognos partner or sales rep and ask for your entitlements.  This will give you a rundown of all the licenses you own and you can use this information to compare against your production system.
2. Speaking of production systems….make sure you utilize a production and a development system.  There are many advantages to this and concerning licenses, it is really important.  In a development environment, you are able to have as many users as you need to test, etc.  If you only have a production environment, any user you add counts toward your licensing.  In my case, years ago, I set up a number of employees to test security groups and access, with the intent that they would never use Cognos.  Those setups cost me licenses and, thus, put me over my license count.
3. Clean up old users now.  Employees and Cognos users come and go, so make sure you keep you user area clean of old users.  This will help speed up an audit and help ensure you are in compliance.
4. If you are over your entitlements, contact your IBM Business Partner now and discuss your options.   They may be able to add licenses and save you money somewhere else or, at the least, will help you get back into compliance to avoid penalties with IBM.
5. Keep track of all users and compare to your entitlements.  Sounds simple, but by the time you realize you added 10 more users, it may be too late and you are over the limit and an audit is about to begin.