Applications Inventory and Attributes

Description — The type of license under which the organization is authorized to use the application: Perpetual, Subscription, Open Source, or Custom.

Benefit(s) — Determines the financial model, renewal obligations, compliance requirements, and exit terms that apply to the organization's use of the application. Mixing perpetual and subscription economics without explicit tracking produces budget forecasting errors and financial planning inconsistencies.

Source — Manually Entered.

Examples — Subscription (Salesforce CRM), Perpetual (SAP S/4HANA legacy license), Open Source (Apache Kafka — Apache License 2.0), Custom (negotiated multi-year enterprise agreement)

Notes — Valid values: Perpetual, Subscription, Open Source, Custom, Not Applicable (for Custom-Built applications).

Description — The number of licenses or user seats the organization has purchased or provisioned for this application — the maximum authorized usage capacity under the current license agreement.

Benefit(s) — The denominator in Utilization Rate calculation and a critical input to license compliance assessment. Organizations consistently over-provision licenses as teams grow and then fail to reduce provisioning when usage declines.

Source — Manually Entered.

Description — The number of licenses or user seats actively used within the most recent measurement period.

Benefit(s) — Enables immediate identification of over-provisioning where licenses purchased substantially exceed licenses used. The difference between License Count and Licenses in Active Use is recoverable cost in subscription environments and negotiating leverage in renewal conversations.

Source — Manually Entered or derived from vendor license portal data where available.

Description — The date on which the current license or subscription agreement expires — after which continued use without renewal would constitute unauthorized use.

Benefit(s) — Prevents the most common commercial governance failure: continued use of software after license expiration, which creates legal liability, audit exposure, and emergency renewal negotiations from a position of weakness.

Source — Manually Entered.

Examples — 2027-06-30 (Salesforce CRM annual subscription), 2028-12-31 (SAP perpetual license support contract), 2026-03-31 — URGENT (legacy reporting tool, auto-renewal in 60 days)

Description — The identifier of the contract or agreement governing the organization's use of the application in the enterprise contract management system.

Benefit(s) — Creates the link between the application inventory and the contract management system of record, enabling APM to surface contract obligations, renewal dates, and exit terms without requiring separate manual research.

Source — Manually Entered.

Description — The date on which the governing contract expires or auto-renews — which may differ from the License Expiration Date.

Benefit(s) — The most operationally critical commercial governance attribute. Auto-renewal clauses in enterprise software contracts are among the most costly and most preventable sources of unwanted financial commitment in large application portfolios.

Source — Manually Entered.

Examples — 2027-06-30 (Salesforce CRM — 3-year contract with auto-renewal clause, 90-day cancellation notice required), 2026-09-01 (ServiceNow — annual renewal, currently under renegotiation)

Notes — Alert thresholds: notify Vendor Relationship Manager 180 days before renewal, escalate to Executive Sponsor 90 days before renewal.

Description — An assessment of the organization's practical ability to exit the vendor relationship and transition the application function to an alternative supplier or insourced solution — reflecting contractual exit rights, data portability provisions, integration complexity, and transition cost estimates.

Benefit(s) — Without understanding exit rights and portability, organizations discover at the worst possible moment that they have no practical path to exit. Proactive assessment enables informed commercial negotiation and contingency planning before the need to exit becomes urgent.

Source — Manually Entered — assessed by the Vendor Relationship Manager and Legal function in conjunction with contract review.