SACRAMENTO, Calif., Feb. 27, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- When Microsoft comes knocking to exercise their contractual right to verify your software licensing compliance, do you know what they will find? Microsoft continues to expand lucrative software asset management (SAM) engagements and formal legal audits as a primary revenue driver. A Microsoft SAM Engagement is now an inevitability for all volume licensing customers, whether they have an Enterprise Agreement or not.

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Microsoft partners who get a share of the revenue from compliance-related purchases are a key element in this strategy, making it more important than ever for companies to be proactive and get independent help in assessing their risk and reducing their liabilities.

The new AuditAssist service from Software Licensing Advisors and AssetLabs gives organizations a way to detect areas of non-compliance, remediate problems, optimize their licensing, and minimize their exposure to Microsoft SAM Engagements before an audit results in a large unbudgeted expense. Continuing the use of AuditAssist allows routine sampling of the inventory to ensure future compliancy.

AuditAssist quickly reconciles Microsoft Effective License Positions for desktop and server products in physical and virtual environments, for which licensing rules are becoming increasingly complex. With a combination of fast, non-intrusive Microsoft-approved inventory tools, and sophisticated management-ready reporting and analysis, AuditAssist can deliver a complete review of a company's Microsoft license portfolio, highlighting areas of exposure, in as little as a week.

Many audit services require the purchasing and deployment of a proprietary inventory products but AuditAssist incorporates data from your existing management tools, including free tools from Microsoft itself, with zero-impact on company operations, networks or computing activity.

"With a library of over 1,000,000 software titles, we're able to decipher which software installs require licenses and which don't, through our real-time web-based software reconciliation engines," says Steve O'Halloran, CEO of AssetLabs. AssetLabs then applies complex licensing and virtualization rules, empowering Software Licensing Advisors' experts to view clients' license exposure via real-time dashboards to remediate deficiencies.

O'Halloran co-founded AssetMetrix, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 and incorporated into both Microsoft SCCM and Intune, before starting AssetLabs.

Software Licensing Advisors deep licensing and negotiations expertise have helped customers avoid millions of dollars in compliance payments by identifying problems and outlining cost-effective remediation steps. Conducting a preaudit also prepares companies to enter Microsoft negotiations with greater confidence.

"Unlike Microsoft's contracted SAM partners, who are incentivized by Microsoft when conducting a SAM Engagement and are required to send information directly to Microsoft, AuditAssist reports are confidential to the customer. We quantify areas of risk, remediate exposure and optimize licensing wherever possible before that Microsoft knock at the door," says Steven Kelley, President of the firm.

Contact: Paul DeGroot, 206-818-7621, info@msftadvisors.com

SOURCE Software Licensing Advisors