Research note · IBM · September 2026

IBM Compliance in 2026: The Formal Review, the Collaborative Baseline, and the Red Hat SCALE Program

IBM's formal license review and its collaborative baseline use the same ILMT data and the same price list; only your rights differ, and the friendlier one is the more dangerous. Add the Red Hat SCALE program, where Deloitte counts subscriptions and clones for IBM, and the three instruments a customer needs to tell apart before answering any of them.

5 pages13 min readPDF, 36 KBSeptember 2, 2026

The briefing

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IBM briefing5:41

IBM's Two Audits and the Red Hat SCALE Program: Same Data, Different Rights

IBM's formal license review and its collaborative baseline use the same ILMT data, the same counting rules and the same list prices; only your rights differ, and the friendlier one is the more dangerous. Red Hat subscription reviews are now a program run at scale by Deloitte. What each asks for, what Deloitte counts, and the one response that works for all three.

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