Hello,
I recently received an email from an auditor with Autodesk requesting me to scan the PCs in our network to ensure we are in compliance with their ToS. I went ahead and ran their ScanWin software on all of the PCs in our office and some remote workers' PCs as well. It seems that we were not in full compliance and are now being quoted at $31k to come back into compliance. There were some issues with their software or with the review process in general, however, and I'd like to go over those in case someone else has a similar issue.
We have been running Autodesk software in our environment for years and years; we still have copies of Maya 2011 running in our environment since some projects were built up using that version of Maya and we occasionally make updates to those projects (once every few years), so we still require the use of our Maya 2011 software. When I ran the ScanWin software, Maya 2011 has two main numbers to take note of: an SN PARENT and an SN INSTALLED. For the use of this example, I'll say that Maya 2011 has an SN PARENT of xxx-xxxxxxxx and an SN INSTALLED of abc-abcdefgh.
We also pay for 4 licenses of Media and Entertainment Collection which renews every year. This product has an SN PARENT of xxx-xxxxxxxx and an SN INSTALLED of zyx-zyxwvuts.
The ScanWin program checks for all of this info, but either the software or our auditor decided that we are entitled to 4 licenses of M&E, but we had 7 installed copies, so we had to pay for an additional 3 licenses of this program (totaling $25k). In reality, we only had 3 installs of M&E out of our allowed 4, AND we had 4 copies of Maya 2011 installed. If you look closely, you'll see that Maya 2011 and M&E have the same SN PARENT number, but different SN INSTALLED numbers. What this means is that our auditor (intentionally or not) only evaluated our review based on SN PARENT numbers, and NOT by SN INSTALLED. This suggests to me that between M&E and Maya 2011, we can only have 4 copies installed TOTAL, even though we paid for 19 physical copies of Maya 2011 10 years ago, and continue to pay for 4 copies of M&E every year.
I'm trying to work through this with my auditor, but it has been frustrating since they made very little attempt to explain the situation to me and kept me in the dark on the process of this audit since the start. I asked what this process would look like, but they only provided me with vague info on the next step, never explaining the entire process to me with clarity that we would be expected to pay a fee to come back into compliance, as this is my first audit of this level; we did have an audit last year, but that came and went within a day with no actions being needed.
I'm mostly posting this in case anyone else has this strange issue in the future, however unlikely it is to occur. Hopefully, this can help some poor guy digging around on Google like I was! Worth noting that I did find this post in the Autodesk forums community that seems to describe a similar issue.
Thanks so much!
