Reconciling Entitlements in a Digital Rights Management (DRM) Environment

A method for discovering a compliant position of a software licensee having multiple entitlements in a digital rights management (DRM) environment, the method comprising:

• determining, by a network-connected compliance platform, a count of all possible assignments within a network associated with the software licensee for each entitlement of the multiple entitlements;
• calculating, by the network-connected compliance platform, contention for each entitlement by dividing the count of possible assignments for each entitlement by a count of the multiple entitlements;
• ranking, by the network-connected compliance platform, the multiple entitlements by contention;
• and
• processing, by the network-connected compliance platform, the multiple entitlements in ascending order of contention,
• wherein said processing causes those entitlements having the lowest contention to be processed first.

A network-accessible platform for optimizing compliance of a software licensee having multiple entitlements, the platform comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a memory that includes instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to:
• determine a count of possible assignments for each of the multiple entitlements;
• calculate a contention value for each entitlement,
• where contention is based at least in part on the count of possible assignments and entitlement quantity;
• rank the multiple entitlements based on the contention values;
• process the multiple entitlements in ascending order of contention;
• for each entitlement,
• calculate a need value for each of the possible assignments,
• where need is based at least in part on entitlement quantity required by each assignment and a number of applicable entitlements having the entitlement quantity available;
• and
• process some or all of the possible assignments in descending order of need.