The Kyndryl handover and orphaned ILMT ownership.

How ILMT gets orphaned.

When a large outsourcing or managed infrastructure handover takes place, the tooling that ran inside the old estate frequently transfers along with the people and the platforms. ILMT is easy to overlook in that move. The server it ran on changes hands, the team that maintained it is reorganized, and the agreement about who keeps it scanning is never written down precisely. The result is an inventory tool that nobody clearly owns, even though your sub-capacity rights depend on it.

Why an orphaned ILMT is an audit risk.

Sub-capacity licensing lets you license only the virtual cores running IBM software rather than the whole physical host. That right is conditional. ILMT must be deployed within 90 days of first eligible deployment, run continuously, and produce quarterly reports retained for two years. Break any of those and IBM defaults to full-capacity charging. An orphaned ILMT tends to break all three at once: agents stop reporting, scans go stale, and the quarterly reports stop being generated or kept. The lookback can then run two to five years of back payments at full-capacity rates.

Reclaiming ownership.

• Confirm where ILMT physically runs today and which legal entity is responsible for maintaining it.
• Verify that agents are reporting across the whole estate, including systems now operated by the provider.
• Reconstruct the quarterly report history, and identify any gap where reports were not generated or retained.
• Write the ongoing ownership into the managed services agreement, so the obligation does not drift again.

What this means under audit.

A provider operating your infrastructure does not absorb your licensing liability. If IBM finds that ILMT lapsed during the handover, the bill lands on you, not the provider. The defensible move is to treat ILMT ownership as a named deliverable of any infrastructure transition, and to close any reporting gap before it is discovered. Where a gap has already opened, our audit defense team works to restore the sub-capacity position and contain the lookback before full-capacity charging is applied.