The implementation of the usage billing policy in many organizations has proved to be a very profitable step. This article discusses the concept of FLEXlm billing and the usage of OpenLM Software in order to implement such a policy.
Many organizations use software systems that are licensed by Floating (concurrent) licenses. This type of license facilitates the organization to install an unlimited number of seats of the software. The number of licenses used concurrently are limited to a predefined number (i.e. set during the purchase). Many of the software systems licensed this way, use Flexera FLEXnet Publisher (commonly known as FLEXlm software). This type of licensing method is commonly used by software vendors that produce high-end software systems.
In many cases, such projects are initiated as a part of a License Server Consolidation project. In order to explain the project, let us use an imaginary company “Green Energy Ltd.” from the USA that has 3 subsidiaries worldwide: UK, Australia, and Japan. Each subsidiary manages several license servers with different software systems. Let us assume the following software inventory:
| Software |
USA |
UK |
Australia |
Japan |
| ESRI ArcGIS |
55 | 34 | 46 | 21 |
| Autodesk Autocad |
56 | 26 | 15 | 21 |
| PTC |
24 | 24 | 12 | 31 |
| Solidworks |
35 | 11 | 36 | 41 |
The usage diagrams produced from OpenLM EasyAdmin show that utilization of some of the licenses is high, while other licenses are practically not in use, depending on the time and location.
This chart demonstrates usage of ESRI ArcGIS licenses in USA alone:
The first step the company took was to consolidate all the licenses so that a single license server will serve all users worldwide. This table shows the license availability worldwide after the consolidation:
| Software |
Total Licenses |
| ESRI ArcGIS |
156 |
| Autodesk Autocad |
118 |
| PTC |
91 |
| Solidworks |
123 |
After the consolidation, the company checked the usage level of their licenses and found that the utilization is more balanced. But, some software systems are heavily used while others have a very low usage rate.
Thus, the licenses were better utilized when the company adopting the following two steps:
- Utilizing the consolidated license server now allows users to use the same licenses over the 24-hour period.
- The creation of a bigger pool of licenses provides a higher license availability.
Based on the usage reports, the company decided to purchase more licenses for some of the software systems, while cutting down the maintenance fee for other licenses that are under utilized.
The managers of some of the subsidiaries have complained that they pay for licenses they don’t use; the reason for which is that the maintenance costs are evenly distributed between the subsidiaries. In order to solve the problem, the company decided to implement a billing policy based on the actual usage of licenses by each subsidiary. The “Groups and Projects” extension to OpenLM System provides this solution. The company has created a Group for each subsidiary using the OpenLM Users Management software.
Thus, the information now looks the same both in AD and in OpenLM Users Management interface.
After a month, the team was able to produce a usage report according to the different groups, thus easily producing a fair billing report for each group.
The UK subsidiary has decided to further enhance the accuracy of their project’s pricing. By implementing a project usage policy, they have measured their license usage of each project. They have created all their projects using OpenLM Users Management application, and have assigned each user to one or more projects. Users that were assigned to only one project did not have to report the active project. Users that belonged to more than one project, report the active project using the capabilities of OpenLM Agent software.
The information collected this way allowed Green Energy UK to price their projects better, taking the cost of expensive software usage into account.
This example provided an insight to the basics of Floating License Billing that can be implemented by OpenLM system. We can see that the capabilities of OpenLM actually enabled the server consolidation project, and also provided all the information needed for billing.
The highlights of OpenLM functionalities demonstrated in this article are:
- OpenLM’s ability to monitor the usage level of the organizational resources.
- OpenLM’s ability to synchronize OpenLM information with Active Directory in order to avoid manual work and to ensure data accuracy.
- OpenLM’s ability to easily provide usage information for different groups of users.
- OpenLM’s ability to track the usage of licenses for specific projects.
Conclusion
OpenLM Software provides all the needed tools for the implementation of a usage billing system in organization using license managers like FLEXlm (FLEXnet). IT Managers are now able to easily implement a usage billing system that can lower operational cost while improving license availability and reducing administration costs.
We have to emphasize that this is not a real world example. In reality, there are many other problems that were not taken into consideration here, for example, network limitations and many other factors.
