by: Mark Cresswell

With a well-executed press-embargo for 14 days, Apple announced the upcoming release of OS/X 10.8 Mountain Lion last week.

Mountain Lion inevitably signals more convergence between OS/X and iOS. But it also introduces some features that are remarkably innovative in areas that are much closer to home for us Software Asset Management companies. Chief among these innovations is the way it offers the tantalizing prospect of closing the loop between software entitlement, allocation and inventory.

Matching inventory to allocation and entitlement has always been the holy grail of software asset management. “Inventory” is a technical challenge solved by ever-increasing sophistication in software discovery and recognition, while “allocation” and “entitlement” are process and data integration driven. Entitlement management involves getting procurement data and other proofs of entitlement from a variety of sources and normalizing them in ways that yield a valid license position.

The complicating factor is the disconnect between software purchasing and software deployment in traditional environments. The result is that the link between the purchase event and the software itself is not only broken, in fact it was never established in the first place.

Mountain Lion seems to have a feature that enables a barcode to be read which unlocks the delivery of software package described in the barcode – the deployment being completed by the Mac App Store.  With Enterprise App Stores and Volume Purchase Programs already possible in the Apple universe, it does not seem too much of leap to imagine Software Asset Management in the OS/X world working in almost the opposite direction to the way it works in the Windows world. Specifically, software cannot be installed until a proof of entitlement has been allocated to the endpoint itself, with the installation being driven by the presence of the valid entitlement at the endpoint.