> An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows and automated ways to keep tabs on who has what and who needs what. They may also be under various compliance requirements that expect due diligence to happen every quarter to make sure everything is legit from a licensing perspective.
Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.
Every new software license requires legal to review it.
These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)
Then they start investigating how often people use software packages and realize most people aren't actually using most software they have seats for. This happens because when software feels 'free' people request it for one-time use for a thing or to try it out and then forget about it, so you have low utilization across the board.
So they start making it harder to add new software. They start auditing usage. They may want reports on why software is still needed and who uses it.
It all adds up. I understand you don't think it should be this way, but it is at big companies. You're right that that the $24/user per month isn't much, but it's one of dozens of fees that get added, multiplied by every employee in the company, and now they need someone to maintain licenses, get them reviewed, interact with the rep every year, do the negotiation battles, and so on. It adds up fast.
> Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.
This is going to differ company to company but since we're narrowing it to large companies I disagree. Usually there's a TPM that tracks license distribution and usage. Most companies provide that kind of information as part of their licensing program (and Docker certainly does.)
> Every new software license requires legal to review it.
Yes, but this is like 90% of what legal does - contract review. It's also what managers do but more on the negotiation end. Most average software engineers probably don't realize it but a lot of cloud services, even within a managed cloud provider like AWS, require contract and pricing negotiation.
> These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)
As I said earlier, I can't speak for other companies but at large companies I've worked at this just simply isn't true. There's metrics for when the software isn't being used because the corporation is financially incentivized to shrink those numbers or consolidate on software that achieves similar goals. They're certainly individually tracked fairly far up the chain even if they do appear as a big number somewhere.
that all is most basic bookkeeping, I cannot take the argument "$x/user × every employee adds up" serious.
Also, latest with 20 employees or computers, someone in charge of IT (sysadmin, IT department) would decide to use a software asset management tool (aka software inventory system) to automatically track, roll out, uninstall, monitor vetted software. Anything else is just unprofessional.
Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.
Every new software license requires legal to review it.
These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)
Then they start investigating how often people use software packages and realize most people aren't actually using most software they have seats for. This happens because when software feels 'free' people request it for one-time use for a thing or to try it out and then forget about it, so you have low utilization across the board.
So they start making it harder to add new software. They start auditing usage. They may want reports on why software is still needed and who uses it.
It all adds up. I understand you don't think it should be this way, but it is at big companies. You're right that that the $24/user per month isn't much, but it's one of dozens of fees that get added, multiplied by every employee in the company, and now they need someone to maintain licenses, get them reviewed, interact with the rep every year, do the negotiation battles, and so on. It adds up fast.