Executive Summary
I recently worked for a company called Anglepoint, and one
of the main things we did was software license management consulting. We worked
with large software vendors, and analyzed how their customers were using the
software licenses they had purchased. We would compare records of what software
a company had purchased with records of what they were actually using and look
for differences where they were either over or under using the licenses they
owned.
One of our biggest clients was IBM. A major problem we faced
in analyzing IBM licenses was simply matching up the records of software that
had been purchased with records of what software was installed within a
company. The names of the software were often different between the sources of
data. The names were often similar enough that a person could identify which
ones matched, but it was difficult for a computer to do so. To complicate
things, many software packages were bundled with other titles, so a purchase of
one piece of software could mean that the company effectively had licenses to
install and use a number of other software titles as well. Traditionally this
was a task that required many hours of labor for each project, and required
extensive knowledge about specific IBM software.
Our solution was to create VBA macros and forms that would
simplify and automate this process as much as possible. We created scripts that
would gather data from web sites and store it in a database, perform matching
between data sources, analyze the data, and build the reports. This report
focuses only on the data mapping portion of the overall effort. I designed and
built this part of the system to make the analysis process faster and require
less specific knowledge of IBM products.
