Using third-party brokers for licenses

You can use third-party management, or brokers, to take care of licenses. Although large enterprises often have contract, license, or purchasing managers to deal with contractual relationships with IT services companies and software vendors, a lot of companies tend to work through a third party that is specialized in this area. These third-party managers take care of all the external relationships that a company has with service or software providers.

In most cases, we talk about upstream third-party management. Upstream means that the third party handles vendors and suppliers, rather than being downstream, where a company is a reseller or distributor of IT services or software themselves. In fact, we're adding an extra layer between the company that uses the software and the services and the supplier of these services and software.

This third-party layer will make sure that licenses are kept up to date using software life cycle management...