Certero for IBM
Make sure you’re able to make safe, data-driven, strategic decisions to optimize your costs with IBM across all your environments, whether they’re on premises, hybrid or multi-cloud.
Business Benefits

Maintain IBM License Compliance

Reduce Management Overheads

Make Cost-Reducing IBM License Optimizations

Verify ILMT
Most business will have a contractual obligation to run the IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) to monitor the IBM products in use across their systems, but this leads to its own challenges – how do you know if ILMT is accurately and fully deployed? Are you falling out of compliance by allowing older versions to remain on machines? Where are the gaps that require your attention? How do you resolve complex product-to-bundle challenges?
Certero for IBM is designed to intelligently complement, verify and clarify your visibility of IBM so that you can see your compliance position and optimize IBM licensing costs with confidence – and it is part of Certero’s unified platform for managing all your IT hardware and software, everywhere – all in one single solution.
Certero for IBM offers much more than your average IBM software license management solution.
It automatically provides an inventory of all IBM applications across all platforms and generates an accurate IBM Effective License Position (ELP). The IBM ELP allows the identification of infrastructure optimization opportunities to realize true cost savings by reducing overall license consumption.
Organizations with complex data center environments use Certero for IBM because it is:
- Quick to provision – with both on-premises & cloud deployment options
- Intelligent – resolving IBM product-to-bundle challenges has never been easier
- Comprehensive – discovers all IBM software across all platforms
- Trustworthy – supplement or challenge ILMT data
- Unified – part of the wider Certero Unified Platform for ITAM and SAM
Ready to address your IBM challenges?
Key Features of Certero for IBM
Visualize Your IBM License Compliance Position
Whether you have an in-house IBM licensing team or if you’d prefer to leverage Certero’s IBM licensing experts to help you to establish your compliance position; generating your Effective License Position (ELP) within Certero for IBM gives you longevity.
Certero for IBM can maintain live visibility of your IBM license compliance position as your estate changes, reducing the overhead of re-generating a compliance position and moving to a more accurate and realistic ‘live’ view of your IBM consumption and compliance – just maintain it as you buy fresh licenses.
Validate ILMT for Safer Decision Making
Certero for IBM makes your verification, auditing and reporting on ILMT much clearer and easier, giving you live validation of the health of your ILMT deployment and that the information you’re seeing is correct, including:
• Whether the ILMT agent has been installed on a device that has IBM
• What version of ILMT is installed
• When did agents report back to the console – actively identifying if anything is wrong
• Whether ILMT is configured correctly
• Identification of ILMT agents that have been configured for different ILMT server(s)
• Visibility of the paths and evidence that ILMT has used to identify products
• Gap Analysis – where ILMT is not deployed, but should be
• Support for all metrics, including PVU, Virtual Processor Core (VPC), Install, Server and Virtual Server
Remove Complexity and Risk at Every Step
Reporting on compliance is an essential indicator, but knowledge of what needs to change and being able to act is where business value is attained. Certero for IBM breaks down the barriers between being informed and being able to resolve issues, such as:
Gap Analysis – Certero’s own inventory can find indicators of where IBM may be deployed across your IT estate – highlighting where ILMT should be deployed, not just where it already is deployed.
Required Quantities – If you’re under-licensed, Certero for IBM’s compliance screen enables a drill-down capability into the licenses required including a detailed breakdown of the virtual machines and hosts that make up this position – giving you all the intelligence you need to make optimization decisions.
ISO 27001 Certified

Product-to-Bundle Reconciliation
Certero for IBM makes it easier than ever to reconcile IBM software and to map relationships between individual products and commercial bundles. This saves many hours of error-prone manual effort. To assist with this, a hyperlink through to the relevant IBM product License Information (LI) document is included so the user can be sure that any bundling is done correctly per the published IBM documentation.
IBM Entitlement Clarity
IBM Entitlement Clarity
IBM license entitlements can be captured, processed and reconciled against inventoried software usage. Full IBM software license management capabilities include downloading and importing Passport Advantage agreements, automatically calculating start and end date of maintenance agreements, capturing PO and other supplier or procurement information. The result is a fully informed, accurate view of entitlement as well as important information such as PVU values.
Virtualization & Sub-Capacity Licensing
Certero for IBM asset management software exports and normalizes the data from all virtualization technologies, including IBM HMC (Hardware Management Console), VMware vCenter and Red Hat RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) amongst others ensuring it has all the information it needs for an Effective License Position to be created.
IBM Licensing Models
Certero for IBM asset management software supports IBM license models including PVU (Full-Capacity), PVU (Sub-Capacity), Virtual Processor Core (VPC) Install, Server, Virtual Server, Authorized User, Floating User, UVU, RVU, Client Device and Establishment. Custom metrics can also be supported.
Have it your way – Product & Services bundles
For skilled SAM practitioners and IBM licensing experts, Certero for IBM is the fastest way to establish and ELP and collect the information necessary to optimize your IBM software estate.
For teams new to SAM or lacking IBM-specific skills, Certero for IBM can be provided with expert help from Certero’s qualified IBM licensing specialists. Learn more about our IBM ELP & Optimization Services.