Hustling without direction is meaningless, while a well-structured approach to developing a solution can lead to unmatchable results. That’s where OpenLM has been unique for the last two decades. While collaborative business intelligence (BI) is the future of software license management, OpenLM has already revamped its BI infrastructure by including collaborative BI in its architecture. “Here OpenLM is two steps ahead of most of its competitors,” said Soumen Roy, Senior BI Manager, R&D at OpenLM.
To understand how OpenLM is driving this transformation, we engaged in a robust Q&A session with Soumen. Here’s an excerpt from the interview.
What is business intelligence from a general perspective?
Soumen: Business intelligence (BI) involves analyzing a company’s data, typically sales and financial information, to identify gaps in processes. The goal is to fix these gaps to improve efficiency, whether that means increasing revenue (in terms of money or time saved) or achieving other objectives.
How is collaborative BI different from traditional BI models?
Earlier, BI data used to be stored in data silos, with access to only one department. BI experts would then spend hours, or even days to decode complex datasets from those silos. Now, with the seamless integration of ML and AI, these data silos have been demolished and BI data is now available to individuals across teams. This is called collaborative BI. It pinpoints pain areas and exposes potential loopholes, all while remaining incredibly user-friendly – thanks to its NLP integration. Thus, it makes the data analysis more real-time.
How is collaborative BI used in OpenLM?
Soumen: In our company, we use collaborative BI in two ways:
First is License Management: We analyze license usage and utilization data and present it visually. This helps management decide which licenses to renew and which ones might not be necessary due to low utilization. We can also identify if specific users or projects are experiencing more licensing issues than others.
Second, Project Management: In engineering companies, it’s common for project team members to log in early and use specific software, tying up licenses that others might then need later. Collaborative BI helps us identify these situations and ensure fairer access to licenses across projects, which is crucial for project KPIs and employee evaluations.
What was our product doing before BI integration?
Soumen: Previously, our product collected usage data from user PCs or license servers and displayed it in reports. However, management is more interested in visualizing data on representation than focusing on the technological excellence behind it.
Interesting. Can you elaborate on that?
Soumen: Sure. OpenLM is great technologically, but there is always room for improvement in data visualization in terms of user-friendliness. The data was there, but it wasn’t presented in a visually appealing way. Imagine an Excel spreadsheet with tons of data – that’s what our reports were like. Users would rather prefer graphs and visualizations to understand the information quickly.
You mentioned improvements to the reporting interface. Can you elaborate on the specific changes made?
Soumen: Sure. We completely revamped the user interface and backend architecture. Earlier, it was more focused on tabular data representation which appealed more to technical users rather than management. More importantly, we focused on making the data visually appealing with graphics. Previously, the information was there, but it was not presented in a user-friendly way.
It seems there were two types of reporting – one in EasyAdmin and another in the Reporting Hub. What were the limitations of the Reporting Hub?
Soumen: That’s correct. There were two functionalities. EasyAdmin offered reports, but the Reporting Hub allowed for visualization through a BI platform. However, the Reporting Hub had a significant drawback – the reports took 3-4 hours to generate. This meant the data became outdated by the time users received it.
What changes were made to improve the reporting speed?
Soumen: We addressed the limitations in two ways. First, we focused on making the interface visually appealing with graphs and charts. Second, and most importantly, we achieved near real-time reporting. There’s now a delay of only 25-30 seconds, allowing users to see up-to-date information.
Thanks for the detailed insight. So are our competitors also providing real-time BI reporting or are we ahead of them?
Soumen: Most of our competitors are giving scheduled reports. It means their customers get BI reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. So we have pretty low competition when it comes to real-time BI reporting, thanks to our collaborative BI-enabled new interface.
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