L&T Power
Streamlined Licensing Expenses, Controlled Post-Usage Software Fees, and Provided Superior Report Access for all the stakeholders.
L&T Power offers turnkey solutions for coal and gas-based power projects and has an excellent track record in implementing projects both in India and overseas. L&T Power is a business brand of Larsen & Toubro Limited, an Indian multinational engaged in EPC Projects, Hi-Tech Manufacturing and Services, operating over 50 countries worldwide.
Trying to manage software licensing in a sizable organization is complex, difficult, and time-consuming.
Difficult to manage, laborious in multi vendor environment
Based in Vadodara, Gujarat, our interlocutor is an IT representative of L&T Power. Having been with L&T for over 20 years, this person has first-hand experience with the nature of L&T Power’s legacy system and told us that monitoring license usage and generating consolidated reports for managed software such as Tekla, STAAD and other vendors, was difficult, laborious, and had always required manual intervention.
Organizational Size and Scope of Portfolio Amplified Challenges
L&T Power’s size, combined with the number and scope of projects within their vast portfolio, and the diversity and quantity of software involved, contributed to, and amplified, 4 specific problems:
• multiple license servers for various project teams causing redundant systems of usage data;
• rapidly changing Vendor Licensing Models;
• unsolicited over-usage requiring post-usage payments;
• absence of any single source of truth when it comes to managing their
Engineering Software Assets.
A benefit for our organization is that we have a stricter control over the actual usage pattern and thus control cost and procurement decisions… that is an advantage.
IT representative of L&T Power
…with no automated centralized software license control or management, it was laborious and costly.
IT representative of L&T Power
Remote Locations
With at least 12-15 on-going and active sites, plus a workforce scattered across many locations, absence of an efficient, centralized software license usage was felt. “In the absence of an automated single source of truth, as far as usage reports and procurement decisions were concerned, L&T Power had to rely on the manually consolidated reports, thus making the decision making process tedious.”
Multiple Redundant Systems
hough L&T Power neither lacked licenses to monitor nor employees to use them, this lack of automated central control still led to oversights on license usage or their allocation. Either way, this resulted in duplication of efforts as well as idling of resources. While timely allocation of software licenses to mission critical projects, remain at top of the priority list, optimum utilization of the existing assets and their management have been another key focus area.
On-going project Demands
Evolving projects and changing demands are nothing new. However, lack of visibility of license usage also created a demand supply gap. The license usage was not always optimal across the projects.
Post usage Payments
However for some software vendors issues were just opposite. Despite enough licenses, the software was still being overused (more than the contracted quantity), and which incurred post-usage payments. Not least because the controlling expenses is impossible, but also because the license expenses were not budgeted and the entire exercises did not feature in the planned activities. Any shortlisted software licensing solution needed to address this. Unfortunately, “In most of the systems that we looked at there was no proactive functionality to control this ‘Trust Licensing’ by certain vendors.”
A more efficient system was required
In order to tackle these software license management challenges, L&T Power continued their efforts with the help of some indigenous tools and mostly manual interventions for years. However, they knew exactly what they wanted and that “a more efficient system was required” to tackle these issues.
“When your representative contacted us, I realized that the features we wanted were already built into OpenLM. This helped me a lot and made my decision easy. You need everything to be in one tool and that was the major advantage. This is the system I wanted.”
…with no automated centralized software license control or management, it was laborious and costly.
IT representative of L&T Power
OpenLM had all the features we required
“We looked into different solutions for license management and could see that OpenLM had all the features we required including the management of this ‘trust licensing policy’. We wanted to bring it all together, that was the main reason we were looking for one licence management system to monitor all our different systems.”
Clear visibility, direct report access, and better cost control
With OpenLM being a single resource for all organizational licence-related information regardless of location, several of licensing problems were easily solved.
“We now have clear visibility of our license usage across all different project teams and sites. Our Project Managers can also directly access our reports, which is excellent.”
How did OpenLM solve your post-usage problem?
“OpenLM has options to both get data from the license managers and from endpoints via agents. Some software records the usage but does not restrict users from overusage. However, we wanted a system that gave us both the administrative option to restrict overusage and, in the case of idle licenses at the user end, the option to terminate them — that’s what OpenLM gave us.”
OpenLM gives me great comfort…
“OpenLM gives me great comfort because, as far as licencing is concerned, all the intricacies are covered, and I feel very comfortable with the product. OpenLM has helped in streamlining expenses and controlling all overused types of software. These are the two critical benefits for L&T Power.”
Getting started with OpenLM
How often do you hear an IT specialist talk about how comfortable they are with a product? Not often, we think. Moreover, if your organization could also benefit from clear visibility, direct report access, no leakage of expenses (as well as the possibility of significant and rapid savings), then feel free to get in touch. If you are not sure where to start, then feel free to contact us any time for a no-obligation chat (contact numbers here).
