Missing from a future of pay-per-use software licensing are the tools that users will need to gauge just what they are paying for. And, given that most users still haven’t bought the software management systems they need just to keep track of the licenses they do have, this hole is not too surprising.

Analysts believe that as much as 70 percent of enterprises either don’t have a way to track their license usage or do so manually.

“With things like virtualization and service-oriented architecture, companies really won’t know who is getting what [services] and when,” says Jim Geisman, president of MarketShare. “The tools are out there, but I’m amazed at the number of people who haven’t invested in them yet.”

Along with virtualization and multicore processors, SOA will be a major driver in usage-based software pricing, says Rich Lechner, vice president of IBM virtualization solutions. “That will move us from an environment of monolithic and static applications to a collection of services that can be combined in any way for business purposes,” he says. “The dynamic and distributed nature of that will force changes in the way users and vendors price software.”

Some kind of usage metering integrated with accounting software will be needed to show what percentage of shared computing resources in an enterprise are being used by each application or department so that they can be billed accurately for that use, Lechner says.

It’s also useful for enterprises who want to convince their own users about the wisdom of moving to these emerging models.

“They can demonstrate to end-users who are reluctant to give up their computing assets that [they] will still get value for the resources they give up,” Lechner says. “Some could actually show them they would be charged less for using such things as virtualized servers.”

IBM introduced its Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, based on technology IBM acquired in its purchase of CIMS Lab earlier this year, in June. With about 54 percent of its own customers applying virtualization in their organizations during 2006, Lechner says IBM expects a rapid take up of its usage metering and shared resource monitoring tools.

Such tools are also helpful for enterprises that might have need of them for more strategic uses such as capacity planning and gauging business unit cost splitting, says Rick Ingram, president of License Tracker.

Accurate usage figures are essential for figuring peak license demands, Ingram points out. At certain times enterprises might need more licenses than they regularly use, so usage metering will be needed to make sure they have accurate data to provide their vendors so they can correctly invoice for the correct use.

They also need to use this type of tool daily if they do use on-demand services, just to make sure they aren’t blowing their budgets on rented software, Ingram says.