Amazon and Salesforce envision a future without restrictive licensing agreements and cost-prohibitive software upgrades, but the industry still has a long way to go before realizing that ambition. IT organizations have their feet firmly planted in the present. Even as more processes are being outsourced to the cloud, the CIO still must maintain full visibility over application usage, ensure installations don’t exceed license purchases, maintain compliance and keep costs to a minimum.

These tasks are made even more difficult for small to midsize companies that face the same risks as their enterprise peers but operate on a much tighter budget. “Software license agreements and IT infrastructures continue to evolve rapidly, making license compliance increasingly difficult to evaluate and enforce internally,” noted Kris Barker, founder and CEO of IT asset management specialist Express Metrix. “Organizations of all sizes are under increasing scrutiny by software vendors and, according to several industry reports, are being targeted for software audits with greater frequency than ever before.”

Express Metrix is looking to level the playing field by making its Express Software Manager freely available for organizations which are running less than 1,000 machines in their environments. Last week they announced the Inventory Edition of Express Software Manager, which offers all of the features of the standard version, including asset reporting, automatic discovery of unlicensed software, as well as access to a software recognition library the company pegs as the “most reputable” in the industry.

Kris Barker

The platform also supports virtualized environments and integrates with Microsoft’s SCCM deployment solution. “We wanted to do something to diminish the fear of software audits,” Barker explained. “No company, whatever their budget or size, should be held hostage by the complexity of software licensing if they are making a good-faith effort to be compliant.”

Suzanne Kattau contributed to this story.