An Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill Of Rights, V2

Of all the assets that an enterprise acquires, enterprise software brings with it the most unusual, onerous, and restrictive set of constraints. In most cases, licensees may not resell, reuse, or share their license. Licensees often encounter numerous grievances across the software ownership life cycle from selection to implementation, utilization, maintenance, and retirement. Poor economic conditions have kept vendors from raising prices for now; however, rapid vendor consolidation has eliminated choice and customer leverage in the market. Upon economic recovery, enterprises can expect price increases in software categories where only a handful of solution providers compete. Fortunately, advances in new deployment options (e.g., software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, cloud computing, managed services, and virtualization) may slowly shift the pendulum in favor of the customer. Forrester's updates to its 2006 Enterprise Software Licensee Bill Of Rights (LBoR) reflect these new best practices from more than 1,000 interactions. CIOs, business process and apps professionals, enterprise architects, and procurement experts should immediately review and incorporate these best practices into their vendor relationships, contract strategies, and packaged apps strategies.