Leading West Coast Transportation Experts
270 users located across 15 different sites 3:1 ratio of users to licenses
Mobility is one of the great challenges of the Smart City.
Original Acquisition of OpenLM
User Base and Software Portfolio
There is about a 3:1 ratio of users to licenses, with no more than 100 licences for the most essential products. Most of the software licenses are governed by software license manager FLEXlm, although PTV uses Wibu’s Codemeter for managing their licenses.
IT had no visibility as to what was going on, i.e. they didn’t (couldn’t) know how many licenses were currently in use and by whom.
Why a License Management Tool was needed?
The company, even with the license managers supplied by their vendors, had poor visibility of the state and usage of their licenses. This led to frustration among the users, questions from upper management as to cost-containment and lots of hard work by IT to come up with answers:-
- Users would contact IT about license availability, as they were getting denials and had no idea of when a license would be made available to them.
- When management queried how efficiently licenses were being managed, which they did regularly, the system administrator would have to invest a lot of time and effort in collecting the data in order to give a full and accurate answer.
- IT themselves could not identify how many licenses from the pool were in use and who was actually using them, because the vendor products did not provide that visibility.
- Each vendor’s licenses had to be managed independently; there was no overarching view of what was happening with the licenses in general. This also involved remembering which license manager came with which software and how it worked.
With challenges like this, it was clear that a better solution was needed, and the marketplace was searched for suitable products, of which OpenLM was one. Testing and evaluation made it the choice for this organization.
Implementing OpenLM
How has OpenLM benefited the Company?
The lack of visibility prior to acquiring OpenLM was the root cause of most of the licensing issues. Once OpenLM was installed, the extensive and flexible reporting made life much easier for all concerned, from users through to the IT Director, who now could get meaningful and accurate reports on ArcGIS and AutoCAD usage for renewal purposes.
The systems administrator stressed how the removal of all the manual work done previously because of inadequate reporting saved an incredible amount of time. There were cost savings too, because it was easy to identify unused licenses and optimize the license portfolio.
We would like to thank the system administrator for granting us this interview and giving us some insights into how OpenLM plays its part at this specialist engineering company.
