Establishing a software license baseline is the critical first step in software license management. You identify what your organization’s entitlements are by reviewing contracts, purchase orders, and license agreements. The process can be challenging—documentation may be incomplete, terms might have changed, and key knowledge often walks out the door with staff turnover. Still, creating a clear baseline is essential for regaining control.
A software license baseline is a point-in-time inventory of your license entitlements—what your organization is contractually allowed to use. It includes contracts, purchase orders, license keys, and renewal records but does not include deployment data.
Without a baseline, you don’t have a clear picture of what you’re entitled to use. This makes it nearly impossible to ensure compliance, respond to audits, or optimize licensing decisions. A baseline is the foundation for building an Effective License Position (ELP).
Finding out what software licenses your company owns can be surprisingly difficult. Master agreements often span years of amendments, terms may have changed with each renewal, and critical documentation is frequently missing. Add in staff turnover, and you’re left piecing together a puzzle without all the pieces. And depending on your current situation, calling your software vendor to ask for missing documentation can raise a red flag—especially if you’re approaching a renewal or suspect you’re out of compliance. The safest approach is to build your entitlement record internally by gathering contracts, purchase orders, and correspondence across departments. It’s a daunting task, but it’s the essential first step toward regaining control.
You’ll need master agreements, license contracts, purchase orders, support renewals, and any documentation that affects your entitlements—such as terms and conditions, amendments, or custom clauses.
Update your baseline regularly—at least quarterly—or whenever you purchase new software, change vendors, or go through major IT or organizational changes like M&A or cloud migrations.
A software license baseline tells you what you’re entitled to use—it’s the foundation of good license management. It includes your purchase history, contracts, and terms that define what software and features your organization owns. An Effective License Position (ELP) builds on that by comparing your entitlements to what’s actually deployed and in use across your environment. While the baseline focuses on what you own, the ELP reveals whether you’re compliant—and where you might be overspending or at risk.
Your organization owns rights to specific software—but simply knowing what you’re entitled to doesn’t confirm you’re in compliance. To reduce licensing risk and prepare for audits or renewals, you must go further. Compare your entitlements (the baseline) to the software actually deployed across your IT environment. Only then will you know your Effective License Position (ELP)—a critical step to identify compliance gaps, eliminate over-licensing, and cut unnecessary spend. At LicenseFortress, we build on your baseline to deliver a complete, defensible ELP as part of our Compliance & Optimization Review.
We collect, reconstruct, and validate your license entitlements. Our team helps you gather contracts, purchase records, and renewal documents—and fills in the gaps when documentation is missing. Then, our legal team reviews your entitlements and interprets licensing rights across complex agreements, mergers, and renewals to establish a solid foundation.
We use ArxAware®—along with your existing SAM, configuration, and security tools—to uncover every software deployment across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. We collect full virtualization and hardware details to ensure complete visibility and verifiable results.
We compare your validated entitlements with actual usage to develop your Effective License Position (ELP). This includes aligning license metrics, adjusting for server roles, and reviewing bundling terms—delivering a precise view of your compliance posture.
We collect, reconstruct, and validate your license entitlements. Our team helps you gather contracts, purchase records, and renewal documents—and fills in any missing pieces. Then, our legal team interprets your licensing rights across complex agreements, mergers, and renewals to establish a solid foundation.
We guide you through remediation options based on the findings. Thanks to our deep technical expertise, we can recommend architectural and configuration changes that not only resolve compliance gaps but also unlock meaningful cost savings.
With your ELP in place, we assess how to make better use of your existing licenses. We align our recommendations with your 3–5-year roadmap to identify areas for consolidation, license tier changes, or platform shifts that lead to real, lasting savings.
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