It was a a pleasure to attend the Compliance Manager Summit in San Francisco last week. The Software Compliance Group presented "Use Big Data to Boost Compliance Results." and it was good, interactive session.

We also enjoyed sitting in on the other presentations and talking to other attendees about their thoughts on the software license compliance landscape. Here are some of our takeaways from the event:

• The number of audits by software publishers in their customer base is trending up significantly.
• Customer IT organizations view risk management/risk avoidance as the most important metric compared to cost savings, cost avoidance, process improvement, productivity improvement and customer success.
• Customers are increasingly shaping the way technology is licensed and sold and are demanding value-based deliverables from any type of compliance engagement.
• Mature compliance programs have been auditing for years, but now they are focusing more on the quality of engagements rather than the volume of engagements. To achieve quality, they leverage available data to prioritize which customer to engage and when.
• Auditing engagements provide an opportunity to provide valuable data to customers they may not otherwise be able to collect.

Finally, I'd like to extend the offer from our session to our blog readers. If you are tracking data from multiple sources and beginning to use that data to generate compliance targets, we'd be happy to help you with a Data Maturity Assessment. Just drop me a line and we can get started.