One way a business can keep information technology costs under control is to negotiate enterprise software licenses, instead of purchasing software one product at a time. But before a general counsel’s company jumps into such an arrangement, the legal department must understand the pluses and minuses associated with enterprise software acquisition.
Traditionally, enterprise licenses that allowed the use of software were limited to large, mission-critical software such as enterprise resource management, customer relationship management, and databases. Now, many midsize and large corporations are licensing their server- and desktop-application software via enterprise agreements that govern the entire organization’s use of the named software, rather than purchasing software one product at a time for each user.
