Software vendors usually send out their audit letters on a fairly predictable basis. The most common triggers are a contract term or ULA coming to an end, or indeed the end of the publisher’s financial year. Jeroen van Dijk, Director of Business Development at Voquz Labs, summarizes what we can expect in the second half of this year.
However, from time-to-time, macro-economic factors come into play too, making it harder for organizations to get audit-ready. Those of you, who were in the business around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, may well recall the crash was followed swiftly by a flurry of audit activity. It sounds crude but in tough markets – when software vendors face declining revenues and when their new business pipelines start to dry up – they will seek out new revenue streams, or at least try to maximize their existing ones. Audits are the mechanism to which they often turn.
Fast forward to 2020 and, if we are to believe the economic forecasters, we are standing on the brink of an even bigger downturn. While it is unclear how severely the recession will bite, or how quickly the economy will bounce back, we fully expect it to herald a major uplift in audit activity.
Audit deferrals will cause a spike in activity later this year
Currently, software vendors – the big names in particular – are seeking to conduct audits on a ‘business-as-usual’ basis. However, not all of them are actually taking place. Organizations are quite understandably requesting postponements, as they simply do not have the time or resources to handle an audit right now.
To their credit, publishers are showing enormous understanding, and have overall granted extensions. However, they will come to a point when audits simply must take place. The second half of the year could bring a marked change in attitude.
IPR-Insights in partnership with Voquz can help companies prepare for these audits by first optimizing the current SAP environment, analyzing digital access, and then mitigating the risks. Most SAP customers are over-licensed without realizing this, by using our samQ tool we identify the over-license position and can use this for mitigating the audit risk.
