Expert IBM Audit Response & Defense Solutions

Audit Response & Defense

Don't let IBM control the offense, without a strong defense

Receiving an official software licensing audit notification is inevitable for most companies. The Canyon Consulting Audit Defense offering is designed to support you and your team through the IBM audit process and achieve exceptional results for your company.

Once Canyon is engaged for an Audit Response, Canyon will:

Immediately engage your team in a proactive internal licensing review.

Identify potential compliance issues and discuss possible financial exposures related to these issues.

Work with your team to develop optimal responses to auditors’ requests for information.

Develop counter arguments to audit findings, as appropriate, including identification of errors that may be discovered in publisher/auditor data.

Provide an effective defense of your company’s positions regarding issues.

Help you negotiate the best settlement possible.

The beneficial outcomes from this service include:

An audit can be a costly event in time, resources and financial impact. Audit findings can range from tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars, and are often unexpectedly and shockingly high to customers.

Software publishers hire expert audit teams from Deloitte or KPMG or sometimes use their own in-house staff to do audits on a daily basis. In addition, publishers’ software contracts are complex and written to the advantage of the publisher.

It makes good business sense to level the playing field and create advantages for your team by engaging a knowledgeable, experienced, and effective consulting team that, on a daily basis, prepares and defends companies against these expert audit teams and is familiar with their strategies and tactics.

In our experience, the client receives an extremely high ROI from contracting for expert services and is grateful to have a knowledgeable, trusted advisor working solely on their side.

We have also seen that a significantly higher ROI can often be achieved by working with auditors on a product-by-product basis, instead of negotiating a percentage of the original settlement demand. Negotiating a percentage discount on the original findings is what companies often do when they don’t have expert support, especially when publishers increase the pressure by attaching time constraints to concluding a settlement.

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Frequently asked questions about our services

We respond to the preferences of our clients. Prior to and during the pandemic, we have worked well with clients remotely; however, we are available for on-site work, as required or desired by the client.

Yes. In today’s environment, it is important to keep track of licensing across all deployments (i.e. on-premise, hosted, private and public clouds), and for all license types (i.e. perpetual licensing, temporary licensing, hybrid, and SaaS licensing).

Yes. We can install ILMT and support the ILMT infrastructure across your IBM Enterprise for all supported platforms, i.e., Windows, AIX, Sun Solaris. We keep ILMT running efficiently by correcting Agent errors, applying fixes, managing upgrades etc.

Canyon has proprietary tools and processes we use in our backend to automate some of our data analysis; however, these processes do not require any tools to be installed or executed on-site at customer locations. In addition to working with ILMT, we also use customer tools such as SCCM, CASE, Service Now, SNOW, USU, Flexera or any other tools already deployed by your company. With some products, specific screen shots or use of commands are necessary to achieve results. We also rely on published license documentation from IBM and HCL in our work.

Yes. We manage many customers' ILMT infrastructure and can keep you in license compliance by working with you remotely through fixed management contracts.

Yes, one of the benefits of knowing one’s licensing position is the ability to save costs for unused or underutilized licenses, or to realize savings from activities such as changing metrics based on current and predicted deployment. This can be a specific scope of work or is often a natural by-product of a pre-audit licensing review or health-check.