Various departments leaders “inherit” responsibility for and administration of specific vendor software licenses, contracts, and general compliance. The problem, however, is that these leaders may have little awareness of, or interest in, the vendor’s complex licensing structure; instead, they may be concerned only with whether or not their team have access to software. So, why not leave the burden of procurement and compliance to the central IT and allow the department leaders to focus just on license allocation? They are the best people to take care of such administrative tasks, as they see the dynamics of the team and are able to identify licensing needs more quickly.
A centralized license management system is critical for every organization, as they can keep their software assets under control. In this article we will talk about a solution that gives total control to central IT but also gives the freedom of dynamic license allocation according to the department’s needs, thanks to the power of virtualization.
Changes in organization structure also alter license allocation
Let’s take the following scenario. The organization purchased a FlexNet Embedded (FNE) license server some while ago, with 30 licenses. That served the department it was purchased for, but as the organization grew and more projects flowed in, they then needed another license server with 70 licenses.
The growth, on the other hand, also brought changes in the human resources section: more people were hired, and workflow optimization now requires distributing tasks among various departments/teams, with each accessing the same license server. Each department has its own team leader, who has little to no visibility of what is happening with the other team. That generates a problem: one can revoke access to software from employees who were allocated licenses by another department leader. Simply put, license management becomes a mess, with lots of phone calls going from one department leader to another.
Align license allocations to the structure with ease
Not all FNE license servers provided by software vendors come with a management interface allowing customers to allocate licenses as dynamically as changes in the organization’s structure demand. OpenLM’s Virtual License Manager solves this problem by bringing all license managers under one umbrella. The interface enables central IT to add FNE license servers into the system.
Next, VLM allows central IT to unify the features list of the existing physical license managers into a virtual list. The above scenario means that existing features will be merged under one virtual license manager containing all the features of the selected physical license managers. And now comes the magic of VLM: using the OpenLM system interface, central IT can divide the total into small virtual pools, allocate licenses according to department needs, and assign team leaders the role of license administrators.
The above move keeps the physical license managers under the control of central IT, and at the same time they have the power to manage the virtual license managers. The virtual layer makes it easy to divide the complete pool of features into smaller pools according to the department’s demands. Leaders are kept away from the physical license manager’s interface, but they have access to the team’s license pool. Empowered with the role of license administrators, leaders can allocate licenses to their team members based on project demand.
If an organization has five departments, and each department needs 20 licenses, central IT can simply unify the software assets into one pool and then allocate virtualized licenses to the various departments, without any hassle, in just a few minutes.
Department leaders will receive a notification about their new role, and from that moment on they will be in charge of their own license pool. They can simply grant or revoke access to software as the dynamics of the team require.
Are you looking to dynamize your licenses and align your software portfolio with the team’s needs? Sign up for OpenLM’s Cloud Portal and activate the Virtual License Manager solution today!
