OpenLM License Harvesting – Pay Less Utilize More

License Harvesting: An integral part of Software Asset Management

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What is ‘License Harvesting’? How can license harvesting help companies save millions of dollars annually? Or how can OpenLM help in answering what is license harvesting and help them optimize their software licenses?

Well, to answer all of these questions on license harvesting, you need to understand the fundamentals of harvesting software licenses.

It is a known fact that every software comes with a set of terms and conditions. Even if the software that we get for free, comes with certain permissions and limitations. These set of terms and conditions are known to be software licenses.

Almost all these licenses are entitled to only one user at a time. This means, that only one user from the organization can use a specific software license at a given point in time.

Though one license for an individual user might sound pretty normal, in reality, it is not! For SMEs or startups, one license/user may fit well. But imagine the same for an MNC or an enterprise-level organization that employs multiple thousand employees. Buying such a humongous amount of software licenses might not be apt or cost-effective for the organization.  

This is where license harvesting comes to the rescue. Let’s dive deep into what is license harvesting in this blog. We will also explain how OpenLM can help your organization by saving millions of dollars annually and boosting your ROI.

All About Licensing Harvesting

Software is an integral part of any organization. Every software comes with a license that mostly allows a single user to use it for a given time period. Usually, organizations cannot assign a single license to multiple users. But they surely cannot accommodate or allocate a single license to multiple users concurrently. 

Companies must buy the right number of licenses to avoid any compliance, audit, or legal problems. However, as mentioned earlier, for larger organizations, buying or acquiring that many licenses might not sound feasible or cost-effective.

OpenLM helps organizations and businesses get the most out of their software licenses with its license harvesting method. This is mainly done by allocating the idle licenses to users (other than the allocated user). 

In other words, software license harvesting can be referred to as a technology that limits an organization from over-purchasing licenses. The software license harvesting method is also an effective way to kill shelfware licenses.

License harvesting can be defined as a proactive way to reclaim licenses of expensive applications that are not being used. OpenLM’s license harvesting feature helps organizations optimize their license usage and reduce costs.

OpenLM’s software license harvesting method primarily involved two different steps: 

• OpenLM identifies the licenses that are sitting idle for a considerable period of time. 
• OpenLM helps the system in safely releasing idle licenses and allocating the same to users who require to use the software application.

Let’s take the example of two separate classrooms to understand software license harvesting from a close hand. Let’s assume that there are classrooms marked as ‘A’ and ‘B’, each with a seating arrangement of 50 students.

Imagine classroom ‘A’ has only 30 students assigned while ‘B’ has around 60 students coming in. Hence, classroom ‘B’ falls short of 10 seats. The authority can find out the vacant seats in classroom ‘A’ and shift them to class ‘B’ to accommodate the students.

This will guarantee seats for all the students without the need of purchasing additional seats. Hence, the school can save on its annual seating budget.

Managing Your Software Assets with the help of License Harvesting

Software or sets of software are the most essential blocks for any business or organization. They are indeed the greatest asset for any business/organization. Software license harvesting is a part of software asset management. It mainly aims in managing all the software owned or possessed by the company.

Using efficient software license harvesting methods; like the one by OpenLM, undoubtedly helps organizations to manage their software licenses efficiently. Else, as mentioned by Gartner, every organization would end up having more than 25% shelfware licenses. There are high chances that organizations can purchase additional software licenses if they ignore their shelfware licenses. Finally, organizations would have an ample amount of licenses that were never put into action.

Software Harvesting: The Need of the Hour

Software asset management (SAM) plays the most important role in managing all the software assets in any organization. Software license harvesting is a part of software asset management that requires equal importance. And why it would not while there are thousands of reasons to harvest software assets. And while talking about the importance of harvesting, let’s first explain the concept of software harvesting.

Software harvesting is the technique to use and reuse software within an organization. This may include the use of the software by an individual or a group of individuals.

Most of the software bought by organizations doesn’t allow multiple users at the same time. Harvesting the software enables other users to use the same software. However, there are certain conditions that need to be fulfilled while harvesting the software.

This way, the organization can reduce multiple things. Harvesting the software in use, organizations can:

• Cut down their overall annual IT budget.
• Optimize and utilize all their software.
• Use more than what has been purchased.
• Manage all their software assets efficiently.
• Skip all types of compliance issues.
• Increase their overall productivity.
• Streamline the usage of software to kill shelfware software.
• Stay away from all audit risks and violations of all terms and conditions.
• Take better and quick business decisions.

Keeping all these in mind, harvesting software becomes essential for any organization. Here, OpenLM can help you or your organization to manage all the software licenses and optimize them. With OpenLM, you can probably double-fold your annual ROI while making your business extremely cost-efficient.

Benefits of implementing License Managers

Cost Reduction: 

With software license managers, organizations can easily manage all their software licenses. In addition, these license managers also streamline the overall software license harvesting process. Hence, organizations can reduce their annual IT expenses by large margins.

Cutting down annual expenditures on purchasing software licenses means a better and optimized IT budget.

Consumption of Software:

Users usually tend to ignore a specific software just after a couple of days, weeks, or so. For example, the organization might purchase better and more effective time management software. 

However, owing to the old manual habits, users or employees might start switching to their old manual practices. In such cases, the software becomes useless and finally finds a place in one of the corners of the system. In case this happens in real time, the organization would be paying for software that its employees are really not using. This would affect the organization largely in terms of its annual IT budget.

Inventory Management:

Since an organization cannot solely run depending on one or a few software, things might start getting complex with time. Moreover, as the organization starts growing, managing the software inventory would get more complex. Add to this, harvesting all the software would also become a challenge if the inventory is not well-maintained or organized.

Having the right licensed managers in such situations would highly benefit the organization.

Stay Compliant:

Software license managers are the best-proven tools to stay compliant. Since every software comes with certain terms and conditions, organizations using them must follow them strictly. Failure to follow any of the given terms and conditions might lead to serious legal issues. 

Having an effective license manager tool in place helps an organization stay compliant with all the terms and conditions. For example, the usage of licenses by multiple users is strictly not allowed. Software license harvesting enables organizations to allocate a single license to other users without even violating any terms and conditions.

Withdraw Licenses Assigned to Ex-employees

No matter how big or small sized, global or regional, organizations always possess the threat of their employees leaving the organization. Whether given notice or not, employees leaving an organization could cause serious issues to the organization. 

Allocation of software licenses is among the most adverse threat an organization always possess. It is not always necessary that once an employee exits the company, the licenses allocated to the person get withdrawn. In such cases, the organization ends up paying for software licenses that are really not in use. OpenLM’s license management tools can help organizations identify underused licenses and reallocate them to other employees.

Software License Installed on Systems that are not in Use Anymore

At times, organizations happen to replace their existing systems in order to cope with recent technology and business requirement. In such cases, an organization can once again end up ignoring all the software licenses allocated to the old systems. And if this happens, organizations would end up spending their annual IT budget on software that they are not using.

Avoid Unnecessary Purchases

The above two points explain that organizations usually ignore some of their existing software licenses. This could happen when an employee leaves the organization or the existing system gets replaced. This surely leads to unnecessary expenses on software licenses.

Hence, once the organization onboards any software license management tools, it can easily avoid all its unnecessary software purchases. 

Save Time, Effort, and Expenses

Imagine an organization having 15 different teams with around 100 members in each team. If the IT department has to assign individual licenses, it would take a lot of time and effort, and be expensive. Moreover, in today’s time, organizations cannot bear any loss in regard to their time, effort, and annual expenditures.

However, a software license management tool or a software license harvesting method can help the organization in this regard.

The OpenLM advantage

OpenLM is one of the most globally trusted engineering and specialty software license management service provider. Whether a large or small-sized company, OpenLM assures at least 20-35% annual savings on license management. Aerospace or automation, applied science or construction, or any other industry vertical, OpenLM can help organizations save millions of bucks annually, and it is a proven fact. Read our case studies to learn more.

Hiring OpenLM service offers a great advantage to organizations as it promises 20-35% annual savings along with boosted ROI. Our license harvesting method is a fully automated process that is regulated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

In order to initiate the license harvesting technique, OpenLM’s license monitoring tool comes into action. The tool uses AI and ML to identify licenses that are not being used. AI and ML can identify systems that are not in use or are not working properly, based on algorithms and patterns.

Though expensive licenses incur a huge investment, they also bring in great opportunities for the organization. The OpenLM License Harvesting method can help optimize the use of software licensed using a concurrent network or token licensing. Our case studies prove how our clients have benefited by using our license harvesting method.

Firstly, engineering time is always more crucial as well as costlier than the overall cost of any software licenses. Wasting engineering time to allocate licenses would incur huge losses to the organization. Organizations can utilize all their licenses without spending additional bucks by adopting the license harvesting method.

OpenLM’s license harvesting model doesn’t allow any interference with the work and responsibilities of any of the engineers. OpenLM ensures that any ongoing projects are saved while harvesting licenses so that users can restore them if needed. Thus, it saves all the engineering effort and time.

OpenLM’s License Retrieval Methods

OpenLM primarily offers four license harvesting techniques: 

1. Save & Close
2. Suspend & Resume
3. Manual
4. Custom

Save & Close: 

In this method, a technical parameter is set for the OpenLM tool to identify idle applications based on the users’ or organizations’ requirements. OpenLM license monitoring tool then saves the user’s work on their workstations and closes all idle applications. This is done in order to release the licenses back to the license pool.

This is an entirely automated process and can be configured for applications like ArcGIS and ArcGIS Pro, AutoCAD (all features that use the acad.exe process), SOLIDWORKS, MATLAB, Catia, Petra, Harmony, Kingdom, etc.

Suspend & Resume

Suspend & resume method is quite similar to the above method. Here, the idle applications are first suspended, and then the license is released and checked back into the pool. The suspended application remains frozen until the license is reclaimed by the application itself when the user tries to resume the suspended session.

Manual Way

In this way, the users identify all the idle software in the EasyAdmin user Interface. The idle licenses are then manually released by pressing a button. This operation can be done both remotely and worldwide as per the requirement.

Custom Way

The custom method of license harvesting is a general-purpose license retrieval for licenses managed by any type of license server. OpenLM facilitates this method of license harvesting by providing a script-based, flexible, configurable mechanism.

Get in touch with OpenLM today to explore more about the license harvesting method. Our proven industry experience and expertise assure your organization of remarkable cost reduction and boost in your annual ROI generation. Get in touch today.