By John Emmitt This CNN article covers the story about Steve Wilhite, the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), receiving the Webby Award on Tuesday. At the award ceremony, his five word acceptance “speech” was: “It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.” So, the long running debate over how to pronounce this acronym should finally be settled. But, apparently not! According to the article, many people are still insisting on the “hard G” pronunciation. The way I see it, if you name your son “Geoff”, then you are the final authority on how to pronounce your son’s name– so its Jeff,…

By Lisa Erickson-Harris Software expenditures for most large corporations are sizable, if not dominant, expenses in the IT budget. New models for software licensing are evolving and arriving on the scene with cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other utility-based computing models offering lower points of entry and more flexibility for software acquisition. Yet, the total amount being spent on software is not expected to decline; in fact software spend is growing at about a 7% compound annual growth rate according to industry analysts. Software will remain a costly expense. When it comes time to ask for budget dollars for a…

By Laura Noonan In many companies, more than one third of total IT spend goes toward software licenses. Software is a huge investment, so it’s no wonder that IT executives are looking for effective ways to optimize software license usage and minimize software spend. Consequently, an important goal within IT is to establish a comprehensive Software License Optimization process that aggregates, normalizes and reconciles software inventory, purchase order, usage data, license entitlement, product use rights and other information from enterprise business systems and determines an accurate license position. This enables the staff to maintain continuous license compliance and a state…