When a software publisher says it wants to help your company get a handle on SAM (Software Asset Management), you should be suspicious. But when the software publisher is Microsoft, you better head for the hills.

"Everything hit the fan when we got a letter from Microsoft offering to 'help us out' with software asset management," a reader writes of her company's experience. "We'd been growing rapidly by acquisition and didn't have a uniform audit program or software asset management program in place. Our company standard is Office 97 and many of them are retail boxes. Therefore Microsoft didn't have records that we had been buying our quota in the last few years, which seems to be why they picked on us."

While Microsoft claims that these "SAM engagements" are not demands for a software audit, it was clear to the reader's CIO that their company had little choice. "So quickly we compiled the spreadsheets and databases from our 200 sites and almost 5,000 PCs scattered around the globe. In spite of the fact that we had established Select Agreements for our two largest acquisitions to get everything squeaky legal, we found out we were a little short."

Since the company was only short a few licenses, they could have easily covered them before Microsoft "neutral" SAM consulting partner showed up. "We knew we couldn't stand up to detailed scrutiny. For one thing, Dell puts our image on the PC's we buy from them for free. That means all of our XP Pro and our Office 97 installations have the same CD key. We have enough licenses all carefully filed in hanging folders, one for every PC, and also tracked in a database, but any lawyer could convict us in court of having the wrong CD Keys installed so we didn't stand a chance of passing. We also had some licenses for versions of Office purchased for one country that were being used in another, and we would have gotten dinged on that."

The reader's CIO was in a tough spot that Microsoft knew how to take advantage of. "The pressure a CIO feels when he has to go to a CEO in an unforgiving company and announce that Microsoft is knocking on the door must be substantial. Microsoft played us skillfully, alternating between dropping statements carefully crafted to raise the anxiety level and saying 'just relax, guys, we are your friends.' Then they sent reps, all smiley-faced and taking the managers out to eat, saying but wait, they could help us. Yeah, right."

"The end result? An enterprise agreement that VOIDED the several hundred thousand dollars worth of Office 2003 licenses we had and instead gave us over 4,000 Office licenses under a new Enterprise Agreement. We had to shell out well over a million dollars for licenses that we already had. Microsoft helped someone, but in my opinion, it was NOT us! Is this a common practice?"

Yes, according to this excellent Computerworld article from earlier this year, what the reader's company went through is by no means unique. Microsoft may profess that its SAM engagements are all about encouraging Software Asset Management, but for Redmond SAM really seems to stand for Spend Additional Money.

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