Esri’s Applications’ Real Usage Data Revealed

Oren Gabay, CEO at OpenLM

Here we’re keeping an eye on the actual license usage of various engineering software vendors. After reviewing the leading applications of Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes, today we’ll examine Esri, the developer of ArcGIS, a popular geographic information systems (GIS) mapping software suite.

We have been collecting anonymous utilization data from hundreds of organizations through the OpenLM License Parser, our interface for parsing license server logs and license files. This free online tool highlights license usage patterns and statistics, and produces insight on license inventory, utilization and availability.

We examined the license usage data of Esri’s popular ArcGIS applications based on different usage data of different organizations. We selected 4 main usage categories:

1. Average Session Duration: Short average session durations usually imply a healthy organizational culture, whereas long average session lengths imply that users are unnecessarily keeping licenses for themselves.
2. Daily Sessions per User: High number of sessions indicates that users employ licenses as needed, and return them to the license pool when they are done.
3. Rate of License Denials: Having not being denied a license at all may imply that the license pool is underutilized. Having too many denials implies that licenses are too few or should be better managed.
   Note that denial reporting may not be fully accurate, since FLEXlm reports more denials than you actually have. The OpenLM server software filters false denials and reports only TRUE denials, but the specific parser implementation is limited in this aspect.
4. Total Utilization Percentage: The ratio between the total usage in a given time period, and the total potential usage of all acquired licenses during that period. Comparing an organization’s “Total Utilization” score to the average benchmark spells out the bottom line for license efficiency.

The results of Esri’s leading applications and extensions are summarized below (usage data for ALL Esri products can be found here):

We strongly advise license administrators and IT personnel to compare the usage data in their specific organization to the benchmark data presented above. This way, they will ascertain whether their use of Esri’s software licenses is in the ballpark.

Next time, we’ll present the license usage data of MathWorks’ leading applications.

Meanwhile, you can download our white paper that includes license usage benchmarks for other engineering applications.

Oren Gabay is the CEO of OpenLM, a provider of software license management solutions for engineering applications