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Hardware can be determined uniquely by its serial number - a concept in use by most major manufacturers.  Software, on the other hand, is not nearly as ubiquitous in its use of serialization - making unique identification of a specific copy of software nearly impossible.

When used in conjunction with the ASN Processor, the MIE tracks each individual software item uniquely using a combination of a unique serial number assigned by the ASN processor, and an incremental License Number.   Those two pieces of information are maintained in the following columns:

SerialNumber
LicenseNo

The ASN processor assigns a serial number guaranteed to be unique to each software line item.  This is done to allow the ASN to be reloaded without fear of causing duplicate counting of purchased software licenses.  However, a given line item on an ASN could specify more than one license.  Therefore, when each line item of an ASN that is sourced by the ASN processor reaches the MIE, the MIE expands the line item into one record for each individual software item.  Those records are stored in the Harvested Software table.  Each record is assigned an incremental License Number, starting at 0.

This pseudo-serialization allows the MIE to uniquely track individual software items.  However, there is generally no physical tie to this tracking scheme - meaning that you cannot query a given copy of software and uniquely identify it by the serial number / license number combination that the MIE is using to track it.