Volume License Planner

Volume License Planner is the definitive platform for managing inventory, entitlements and compliance for your Open, Select and Enterprise Microsoft Agreements.

Software vendor audits are a fact of life now for most large organizations, and in the future they will become more prevalent for smaller organizations. For virtually all companies the largest software vendor is Microsoft. Volume License Planner completely solves the challenges of audit and true-up preparation for customers of a Microsoft Volume License agreement. With specific support for the nuances of Microsoft licensing, and a discovery engine designed to accurately, and in context with entitlements, identify installed software, Volume License Planner has been shown to reduce the effort to prepare for Microsoft audits or true-ups from weeks to just a few hours while dramatically improving accuracy.

Overview
Key Features
Screenshots

Volume License Planner is specifically designed with an awareness of Microsoft licensing idiosyncrasies. VLP takes as input the “Transaction Data” table from a customer MLS. This data is processed to provide a current entitlement state based on history of procurement, license types, renewal activity, superceeded products, Microsoft release history etc. VLP is backed by the power of Chaklun™, a Scalable LIVE!® facility which contains, and keeps current, the necessary Microsoft catalog information to perform this entitlement calculation.

VLP also uses the raw discovery and inventory features of Scalable LIVE! to get an accurate picture of which Microsoft products are installed where. Using its knowledge of Microsoft licensing rules, it then correctly represents the number of licensed units of each licensable software package; using identical normalization methods as the entitlement calculation. For example, for licensed products that have ‘per processor’ entitlement, VLP will show the aggregate number of processors upon which the software is installed.

The result is a perfectly calculated Effective License Position (ELP) report that can be used for internal planning and compliance purposes or to submit to Microsoft as part of a true-up or audit exercise.

VLP provides several additional planning features summarized on the features and benefits tab.

Features	Benefits
1 Imports Microsoft Licensing Statement to calculate entitlement	1 Eliminates the effort involved in manually reviewing the history of procurement and renewal activity to calculate the current entitlement position. VLP maintains all the catalog information and logic to correctly interpret the impact of certain renewal decision for Software Assurance etc and considers Microsofts release history to work out release entitlement. In addition it correctly applies upgrades and SA Step Up purchases.
2 Agentless deep discovery, inventory of decoding of entire Microsoft estate	2 VLP can identify exactly which Microsoft package and version is installed on each computer in the estate using exactly the same normalization techniques Microsoft themselves use to create the entitlements in the MLS. This ensures that there is zero manually correction requires to perform compliance or true-up analysis. VLP is able to to this because it combines decoding of Microsoft digital product IDs with a comprehensive software recognition and procurement catalog.
3 Automate Effective License Position creation	3 VLP will automatically generate an Effective License Position report in a format acceptable to Microsoft for True-Up purposes. The only manual intervention in the creation of this report is to indicate to VLP the location of the MLS spreadsheet. VLP does the rest automatically.
4 Calculated True-Up exposure	4 VLP can also import a Customer Price Sheet. Details from this document are then used in conjunction with the ELP to calculate the value of the installed inventory and whether and payments are due Microsoft. VLP enables this report to created entirely automatically as frequently as the customer requires thereby ensuring the True-Up exposure is known at all times. Having this information so readily to hand ensures proactive procurement steps can be taken to minimize costs at the annual True-Up event
5 Awareness of Microsoft Product Use Rights	5 VLP is can manage all your downgrade, work-from-home, right of second use, MSDN and other use rights to ensure that your true-ups are accurate. In addition, VLP can help identify those machines that should not be qualified as part of any EA you may have. This mechanism ensures that true-up counts do not include machines that are considered by the customers a being outside the EA