BSA teams up with IiS on SAM

Investors in Software, a not-for-profit organisation, announced on Tuesday that it is to join forces with the Business Software Alliance to help UK companies tackle the issues around software asset management.

At the same time, Investors in Software (IiS) has taken on its 17th member organisation, HP, which will join the likes of Microsoft, Symantec, Ernst & Young, Deloitte and Oracle in addressing some of the issues around software asset management (SAM).

The members of IiS have been some of the principal companies driving the adoption of the ISO/IEC 19770-1 international standard for SAM that was published last year.

IiS and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) say that they hope to "accelerate the adoption of SAM best practices, in particular supporting ever-wider adoption of standards".

Shaun Fröhlich, IiS board member, said: "IiS believes passionately that organisations should gain every bit of value from their software licence assets, and our growing community of members shows just how widely our vision is shared across the industry."

IiS was originally formed partly in response to organisations like the BSA and the Federation Against Software Theft (Fast), often seen as being partly controlled by organisations who stood to benefit from their activities.

While the BSA is an independent not-for-profit organisation, Fast was a private company. In May, Fast was sold to Computer Software Group (CS Group), a software company.

IiS was founded only last year, and it has drawn its membership from many of the companies that originally worked on ISO/IEC 19770-1. That group is now working on a new standard that sets out a scheme for storing information on software assets and their configuration — making it far easier for IT managers to understand exactly which assets they possess and how they are being used.