Business Software Billing

Use floating license billing – is the application in version 1.5.5 Openlm

Floating license usage billing – its implementation in OpenLM Version 1.5.5

The implementation of the billing policy for use in many organizations has proven a very cost effective way. This article discusses the concept of sales and use FLEXlm Software OpenLM in order to implement this policy.

Many organizations use software systems that are authorized by floating (concurrent) licenses. This type of license facilitates the organization to install an unlimited number of posts in the software. The number of licenses used simultaneously is limited to a predefined number (ie, set in the purchase). Many of the licensed software systems in this way, the use Flexera FLEXnet Publisher (commonly known as FLEXlm software). This type of licensing method is commonly used by software vendors who produce high-end systems software.

In many cases, these projects are initiated as part of a license server consolidation. In order to explain the project, we will use a fictitious company "Green Energy Ltd." U.S. which has 3 subsidiaries around the world: United Kingdom, Australia and Japan. Each subsidiary manages multiple servers licenses with software systems. Suppose the inventory of software:

U.S. Software United Kingdom Australia New Zealand

ArcGIS ESGRI 55 34 46 21

Autodesk Autocad 56 26 15 21

PTC 24 December 24 31

Solidworks 35 11 36 41

Use diagrams produced from OpenLM EasyAdmin show that the use of some of the licenses is high, while others hardly licenses in use, depending on the time and place.

This table shows the use of ESRI ArcGIS licenses in the U.S. only:

The first step in the company was to consolidate all licenses for a single license server will serve all users throughout the world. This table shows the availability of licenses throughout the world after consolidation:

Software licenses Total

ArcGIS ESGRS 156

Autodesk Autocad 118

PTC 91

Solidworks 123

After consolidation, the company revised the level of use of their licenses and found that the use is more balanced. However, some systems software are widely used, while others have a very low use rate.

So, licenses are best used when the company's adoption the following two steps:

• The use of the consolidated license server now allows users to use the same licenses during the 24 hours.
• The creation of a larger group of licenses provides increased availability of the license.

Based on the reports of use the company decided to buy more licenses for some software systems, while logging quota themaintenance other licenses that are underutilized.

The managers of some of the subsidiaries have complained that the payment of licenses not used, the reason is that maintenance costs are equally distributed among the subsidiaries. In order to solve the problem, the company decided to implement a policy of billing based on actual use of the licenses for each branch. "Groups and Projects "extension system OpenLM offers this solution. The company has created a group for each subsidiary to the user management software OpenLM.

In order to avoid the need for manual refer to groups of users, the system administrator decided to use the ability to synchronize OpenLM Active Directory users and groups database OpenLM server. As membership of the organization of each user based on the tree structure of the organization in the year, the director chose the OU and configure the system to continuously synchronize information with EA. Thus, each new user automatically be associated with the correct branch. OpenLM automatically updates the users belonging to a subsidiary, in accordance with any change in position.

Therefore, the information that now looks the same in both AD and OpenLM management interface users.

After a month, the team was able to produce a usage report according to different groups, thus easily developing a fair billing report for each group.

The UK subsidiary has decided to further improve the accuracy of its proposed pricing. By implementing a policy use of the project, measured use of the license of each project. They have created all your projects with OpenLM user management application and has assigned to each user to one or more projects. Users who were assigned to one project did not have to report the current project. Users belonging to more than one project, the report of the asset project using the software's capabilities OpenLM agent.

The information collected in this way allows Green Energy UK prices their best projects, the cost of using expensive software into account.

This example provides an overview of the basics of billing floating license that can be implemented by the system of OpenLM. We can see that the capabilities of OpenLM really possible that the server consolidation project, and provides all the information necessary for billing.

Highlights OpenLM functionality demonstrated in this article are:

• OpenLM ability to monitor the level of use of the resources of the organization.
• OpenLM capacity to synchronize with Active Directory OpenLM information to to avoid manual labor and to ensure the accuracy of the data.
• OpenLM ability to provide user information to different user groups.
• OpenLM ability to track use of licenses for specific projects.

We must emphasize that this is not a real world example. In fact, there many other problems that were not taken into account here, for example, network limitations and other factors.

Summary

The implementation of a licensing policy to use billing allows the organization to distribute the costs of using software from different parts of the organization. The need implement a policy shared by companies using the software system is often expensive FLEXlm license, RMS Safenet, HASP Safenet, IBM LUM, among others. OpenLM allows organization to collect time use according to groups or projects.

About the Author

Oren Gabay

OpenLM LTD

www.openlm.com