People buy water in big plastic bottles for the same reason organizations purchase licenses in big quantities: the price is lower when you buy in bulk. But then a problem arises: families with children know that a 2-year-old child has different needs than a teenager, so how can they pour out the required quantities without flooding the kitchen? With a water pump, of course (or similar kitchen utility). By inserting the water pump into the bottle, each family member is able to satisfy his or her needs in the desired quantity.
Now, let’s see how this works in an organization. Continuing with our example – the family as the organization, members as departments and the water bottle as the license pool – we have a similar situation. The per-license price of a software is more accessible, so it makes sense to take that option to save on software license costs.
The challenge
Even when analyzing the situation just from the licensing perspective, each organization is unique: it has its own specific headcount, workflows, departments, and dynamic. Publishers provide only a single set of tools – in this case a license management interface – which was designed to do the basic license management tasks, but it lacks the ability to adapt to the organization-specific environment.
Therefore, license management becomes a challenge for organizations, so they are unable to optimize their license pool and right-size their IT costs. This leads to excess or lack of software licenses, but in both situations the organization is losing money. An excess of licenses is money thrown out of the window, because no one is using them, while a lack of licenses means loss in productivity, due to the time wasted on waiting for others to close the app and gain access to a license.
Let’s take a real-life scenario: a company has five departments that are using, for example, AVID software, and they would like to allocate 20 licenses per department. The problem is that the management interface provided by the vendor is not able to do this, so, in the end, one or more departments are allocated licenses, while others don’t get access to them.
How to adapt the software pool to your organization’s environment
Just like in the case of the water bottle, you need an external tool to help you adapt the license pool to the organization’s structure and dynamic. In the case of a water bottle, that’s the water pump. But how about software licenses? It’s three words: Virtual License Manager.
Virtual License Manager
OpenLM’s Virtual License Manager (VLM) acts like a water pump: it allows IT managers to right-size the organization’s license pool and maximize ROI through efficient license usage. How? It’s simple. As its name suggests, it creates a virtual layer that sits on top of the license manager the organization owns and, just like the water pump used in the example, allows IT managers to allocate as many licenses as needed per department.
VLM provides the right toolset for IT admins for better license allocation management of software licenses in real-time. It empowers IT professionals to de-centralize the license pool and divide the whole license portfolio into dynamic sub-tenants, to which they can allocate department leaders. The decentralized license allocation system is powered by a very sophisticated and secure role-based access infrastructure.
Want to turn your static license pool into a dynamic one? Activate VLM in the Cloud Portal.
