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DDMI supports ISO 19770-2 tags
First of all – I am proud of the DDMI 9.30 release.
DDMI 9.30 is a follow up to DDMI 7.70 and we have continued to focus on software inventory in this release (this is the 3rd consecutive release where we added significant functionality in this area).
The most important capability that we have introduced in this release is support for collection of ISO 19770-2 (see Wikipedia here) software identification tag data. We also, of course, provide compliant tags with this DDMI release.
I am particularly proud of this feature. I believe it is absolutely essential that software vendors adopt a standard way by which their software can be identified. After all, software audits are a common occurrence and I haven’t talked to any customers who don’t want to pay for the software they use (well, OK, nobody wants to pay if they don’t have to – but businesses want to be compliant with their license contract). It has been a while since I blogged on this topic, but it doesn’t mean I stopped my support for the standard. And as a product manager, this release is a proof of my (and HP’s) support for it.
I recall wondering how quickly this standard would be adopted – I think that all of us who think this standard is a good idea hoped it would be adopted quickly. But, the reality is this will take some time. Good news is that ISO 19770-2 tags can be used by anyone, not just software vendors. I have already talked to a few organizations that want to adopt these tags to track their home grown applications. After all, you can expect vendors to help, but how do you keep track of your own? The answer to that question has been either you can’t, or through a lot of hard work (often in-house software recognition pattern creation).
So the tags provide significant benefits. I can hope (I haven’t checked, so I don’t know), but it would be great if the tags could be automatically created by the installer tools.
The second significant software inventory feature is improved inventory of Oracle software. As you probably know, Oracle software is not always easy to inventory – it is present in most enterprises, but collection of inventory has not always been that easy. And Oracle does not support ISO 19770-2 tags today (to the best of my knowledge). If they did, my #1 feature would have taken care of this item as well (in a classic 2 birds with 1 stone type of way). However, we did it the hard way. This means that Oracle inventory (including identification of installed options) will start getting easier (I won’t promise it will solve all the problems, but initial results are promising).
Of course, there are other features we have added. You can learn more here, or by contacting your HP sales rep.
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Are you familiar with the TagVault? It is a non-profit organization for companies to register their ISO-19770-2 tags. Actually they describe themselves as:
TagVault.org is a non-profit organization designed to help organizations in the software industry work together in order to maximize the value of software identification (SWID) tags.
It is high time and way over-due. It is great that the flip side of having software that can gather and interpret the tags.
The next step, as defined in ISO-19770-4, is to read a tag and know what sort of licensing model was used when installing the software.
