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IBM runs two compliance motions. The formal license review runs under the Passport Advantage audit clause, with a third party auditor, and gives you process rights. The collaborative baseline runs on goodwill through IBM's own licensing organization, asks for the same data, and gives you no rights unless you insist on them. The difference is procedural, not substantive: same ILMT data, same counting rules, same list prices, same Cloud Pak proposal at the end.
I am Tom, Claire is with me, and this briefing is how to tell the two apart, why the friendlier one is the more dangerous, and what Red Hat's Deloitte run review program asks for.
Set them side by side. Contractual basis: the audit clause, against a partnership request that leans on your sub capacity obligation to produce ILMT reports. Who runs it: a third party auditor at IBM's cost, against IBM's own licensing team. Scope: defined in the notice and negotiable, against open ended, twenty four months to start and then whatever the analysis suggests.
Your rights: scope negotiation, a timeline, a draft report you can challenge, confidentiality, a documented close, against none by default. Cost to IBM: months and auditor fees, against a few emails. That is why IBM prefers the baseline.
Why is the baseline the more dangerous of the two? Because a validated baseline is an admission. If the informal route stalls, a formal review inherits it as the agreed starting point. If it succeeds, the Cloud Pak or enterprise agreement proposal that follows is built on numbers you supplied and confirmed.
The request also routes to the ILMT administrator rather than to procurement, so the data often leaves the building before anyone with negotiating authority knows it was asked for. And a courtesy is an admission too. Confirming a baseline summary by email because it seemed polite becomes the anchor of the negotiation. Acknowledge receipt.
Note disagreements in writing. Agree nothing.
Red Hat now has its own motion. Before the acquisition, compliance was a renewal conversation, forgiving whatever the account team could not see. Since the acquisition it has been industrialized into a program delivered at scale by Deloitte on Red Hat's behalf. The notice arrives under a program title, described as a subscription review or a customer success engagement, citing the verification language in the Red Hat Enterprise Agreement, with a short deadline.
The data request is the whole estate: Satellite exports, hypervisor inventories, cloud instance lists, OpenShift core metrics, developer enrollments. Deloitte supplies the scripts and asks your platform team to run them. The output is a back dated shortfall at the production tier.
Where do the findings come from? Unsubscribed guests on unsubscribed hypervisors, where guests drift outside the subscribed socket pairs. CentOS conversions where only production was subscribed. OpenShift cores sized to allocated rather than running cores, with the included RHEL node entitlement rarely credited unless you raise it.
Production on self support or Standard, repriced to Premium. Developer subscriptions running real workloads. Your own images in the cloud. Here is the part that matters: reconciliations run both ways.
Over subscription, tiers paid above need and entitlements not applied are as common as shortfalls, and Deloitte surfaces only the findings that favor Red Hat unless you supply the rest.
Notice who is in the room. Deloitte delivers IBM's Client Value Acceleration engagements and runs Red Hat's subscription reviews. The same firm can be baselining your IBM estate and reconciling your Red Hat estate in the same year, and the findings are consolidated into one IBM negotiation, where the shortfall becomes a renewal true up: back dated subscriptions plus a forward multi year commitment, with the discount conditional on signing. Why it scales now: Simple Content Access removed system level enforcement in 2021, so nothing technical stops an unentitled host from registering, compliance is self policed, and most estates never assigned anyone to count.
A firm with standard templates finds the gap in every estate it touches.
The move is the same for all three. Route the request to whoever owns the contract; the ILMT administrator and the Linux team do not answer IBM or Deloitte. Read the contract for what can be requested without a formal review, usually the ILMT reports you must retain, never Satellite databases or scripts against production. Run your own reconciliation first: ILMT peaks against entitlements, OpenShift on running cores.
Remediate before disclosure. Provide a reconciled position, not raw data. Agree nothing. Then move every finding into the renewal on your calendar, with IBM and Red Hat negotiated as one.
The full research note is free to download under this video, at redresscompliance dot com slash newsletter slash september.
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