Odd that a survey taken on behalf of a company that sells Licence Management systems designed to avoid this sort of thing should conclude that other companies (presumably not using a Licence Management system to monitor this) are possibly violating their licences and risk legal action.
iTunes-for-corporates private app stores put firms at risk – survey
Businesses risk flunking software licence audits and overpaying for their apps by rolling out their own take on Apple’s iTunes app stores for business. That’s the warning from an IDC and Flexera Software poll that found 63 per cent of companies are planning their own enterprise app stores. Stores will be used by staff to …
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Wednesday 13th November 2013 21:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's Fear, Fear for breakfast
It's not only stupid, it's wrong in so many ways that I'm struggling to come to grips with how it was published at all. Allow me:-
Enterprise app stores are for _your_ apps. The ones you want to deploy without going through the apple app store. Now by definition you won't be violating the licences on your own software.
If you include a 3rd party IPA (app) in your store then yes, you need to make sure you are licenced for the number of users but guess what ? That applies to windows desktops now. There is no significant difference.
If your users want to use apps from the Apple app store, they need either individual accounts or you need a Volume Purchasing Plan. Now if you get a VPP you buy a number of copies and then Apple either gives you tokens for you to distribute to users, or licence keys that you can deploy (and redeploy) via MDM.
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Wednesday 13th November 2013 12:19 GMT Wize
We have a corporate app store.
Anything that we have a company licence for (eg MS Office can be installed on any PC and our existing licence covers it) is listed as free.
Anything that requires a new licence (eg Adobe's PDF editor) carries a cost. Software carrying a cost then has to be justified by your manager (as his cost centre will have to shell out). Your software then gets pushed remotely when everything is signed off (and, most likely, an extra licence is purchased by some department).
The guys running the app store can then log who has what software and what licence applies to which instance.
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Wednesday 13th November 2013 13:01 GMT QuietLeni
Corporate Software Stores are great (if there is some control and approval).
I have worked with Corporate Software Stores and they are really effective for allowing users to just install the stuff that they need, as long as there is a process for approval by someone who needs to pay for it.
Also, it is not beyond the whit of man to include detection abilities for software that then also tracks the software installation to a license and therefore to make sure that everyone knows the license position BEFORE FAST/Microsoft/Adobe come knocking on the door.
Furthermore, it is also possible to monitor software executions, so that when someone has got a premium product installed, you can then find out if they are using it (and whip it off if they are not)!
Software Licensing (once you know how it has been paid for) is not that difficult to work with...