Building & Infrastructure Design (BIM)
A BIM coordination session can hold a dozen seats while one person drives.
Open iT meters usage of Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, MicroStation, OpenRoads and Tekla, so a seat nobody is working in stops counting as one you have to pay for. Right-size named-user and token subscriptions, reclaim the seats held open between milestones, and renew with your own numbers instead of the vendor’s. One construction firm used this to cut its Autodesk seats in half. How, further down.
- Tell an active modeler from a seat someone forgot to close
- Reclaim idle Revit and Tekla seats with the right method for each
- Bring 12 months of real demand to your next Autodesk or Bentley renewal
A seat opened for a Monday coordination call can stay checked out all week. To the license server, that’s a full-time user.
BIM work comes in bursts. A Navisworks clash review or a federated Revit model has several people each holding a seat at once, often while one drives and the others follow. Reopening a large model is slow, so seats tend to stay checked out between milestones instead of being handed back.
Now watch it scale. One seat held for a week is a rounding error. A floor of them, office after office, is a line on the renewal. A year of renewals signed on that inflated number is real money the business never chose to spend, because the license server counted every held seat as fully used and no one had the data to argue.
The stakes rose when the vendors changed how they bill. Autodesk moved to named-user subscriptions and Flex tokens; Bentley moved to Enterprise 365 consumption. When a seat is billed by the name or the token, idle time is money leaving the business, not a rounding error.
Was Open iT leistet
1
See who is actually using it, not just who checked it out.
True Active Usage reads keyboard, mouse, CPU and I/O, so an engineer modeling in Revit or Tekla registers as real work while a seat left open in a review stands out. You stop guessing which held seats are busy.
2
Recover the idle ones without interrupting anyone.
Where licenses run on FlexNet – Autodesk network licensing and Tekla – an idle seat is suspended and handed back to the pool, then resumed where it stopped with the model intact. Named-user and token seats can’t be suspended, so those are right-sized to real demand instead. Either way, nobody loses their place.
3
Watch the bill form before the vendor sends it.
When Autodesk Flex charges by the token and Bentley E365 by consumption, elapsed-time and concurrency reporting per application and per user shows consumption building through the month, while you can still cut the idle time inflating it.
4
Walk into the renewal with the number in hand.
BIM demand rises when a project staffs up and falls when it closes. Twelve months of concurrent peak demand is the figure you put on the table, so you renew for the peak you actually hit, not the seat count you drifted into. And if your teams span time zones, the same pool can follow the sun instead of sitting idle overnight in one region.
What the license server sees vs. what Open iT sees
| Your license server | Open iT with True Active Usage |
|---|---|
| Whether a seat is checked out | Whether a seat is checked out and whether anyone is working in it: keyboard, mouse, CPU, I/O |
| A coordination seat held all week reads as a full-time user | A held-but-idle seat is separated from an actively driven one |
| One utilization figure to hand the vendor at renewal | Twelve months of concurrent peak demand, per application and per user |
| No way to recover an idle seat without a manual ask | Idle FlexNet seats (Autodesk, Tekla) suspended and handed back, then resumed in place |
Mitta Oy assumed it needed far more Autodesk capacity than it used. After Open iT gave it visibility into real usage against the seats it owned, it reduced its Autodesk licenses by as much as 50%, with no effect on user productivity.
— Mitta Oy
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Idle-Seat Calculator
Estimate the named-user and token cost sitting idle in your BIM estate.
a year sitting idle on named-user and token billing
- Total BIM spend
- $0
- Seats on named-user or token billing
- 0
- Spend on those seats
- $0
- Idle seats among them
- 0
Wie dies berechnet wird
Seats on named-user or token billing = total licensed BIM seats × the share of seats on that billing. Idle seats among them = those seats × your estimated idle share. The idle cost is those idle seats × the annual cost per seat.
The idle share is your estimate, not a measurement. Measured usage across a full renewal cycle gives the real figure.
This is an estimate based on the numbers you entered. Actual idle cost depends on your licence terms and how your teams use the software.
Häufig gestellte Fragen
Will harvesting interrupt someone who is modeling?
No. Active modeling is true usage and is never suspended or terminated. Only idle, held seats are targeted.
Can Open iT recover Autodesk and Tekla seats?
Autodesk network (FlexNet) and Tekla seats support suspend and resume: the license goes back to the pool and the session is restored where it stopped. Named-user and token subscriptions are optimized by right-sizing to real demand rather than by suspending.
Does this help with named-user and token subscriptions?
Yes. Elapsed-time and per-user reporting shows the usage behind Autodesk Flex tokens and Bentley Enterprise 365 consumption, so you can cut the idle time that drives the bill.
Can it warn us before a renewal or when licenses run short?
Yes. Open iT tracks license-expiration dates so a renewal does not sneak up on you, and email alerts flag denials and usage that crosses thresholds you set – the same kind of alerting teams use to catch idle checkouts before they hit the invoice.
Which BIM applications are supported?
Autodesk (Revit, AutoCAD, InfraWorks, Navisworks) and Trimble Tekla are in the Level 3 test record; Civil 3D and the wider Autodesk range are metered through the Autodesk connector. Bentley is metered through Bentley Cloud and Bentley Hosted. ArchiCAD and Vectorworks are not yet confirmed.
The vendor’s account manager knows exactly what you contracted. Nobody on your side knows what you used, because the answer sits in a dozen consoles that do not talk to each other. One record across your BIM license managers closes that gap. It is how a construction firm cut its Autodesk seats in half, and it is what turns your next Autodesk or Bentley renewal into a two-sided conversation.