Nutzen Sie die Macht Ihrer Nutzungsdaten

[0:01] Mae: Good morning and good evening everyone and welcome to our live webinar, Harness the Power of Your Usage Data. My name is Mae and I am your host for today. Before we get started let me encourage everyone to ask questions, drop them in the comments section, and Linda will address them in the Q&A session of her presentation. If we don’t have the opportunity to answer all of the questions or if there are any questions that need further investigation, rest assured that we will send them to Linda and we will reach out via email or through LinkedIn to answer those inquiries.

[0:33] Our presenter has been an industry speaker since 2014, delivering insightful tech talks at the following conferences: SAE International, Oilcomm, SBGF, IT FMA, Nathan’s, IAI, TAM, and more. Based in Houston, she is a high energy senior level consultant with more than 40 years of diversified experience in the technology industry. She is a proven leader with a unique blend of responsibilities in small and large companies with a passion for building successful businesses. For almost a decade she has been helping clients solve their business issues around software licensing. Ladies and gentlemen, Open iT senior solutions architect Linda Cole.

[1:20] Linda: Thank you very much for that warm introduction Mae, and welcome everybody to our second session in this live webinar, Harness the Power of Your Usage Data. Tonight, and it’s tonight for me, it’s probably morning for some of you, so welcome to everybody across the world. But we want to go through some examples and talk about why and how you and your organizations can do this. But let’s start with this quote from Edwards Deming, without data you’re just another person with an opinion. And this is so true. So many of the folks that we talk to, they just don’t have the visibility that they need to make informed decisions. So they kind of have bits and pieces sometimes of information, but really without a usage metering solution it’s really difficult. You can still do it, it’s just much more manual.

[2:17] So one of the reasons that it makes it so difficult is that the industry is changing. So we really focus on the niche of technical applications, and what’s happened is, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, the way those applications were licensed is when they started getting more and more expensive they went to a floating or concurrent licensing. But now they’re changing those licensing types. So they’ve gone to named user, to cloud-based subscription versus perpetual, tokens, and there’s other licensing methods as well or entitlements. And some vendors have multiple different types of licensing in a single contract. So it makes it really difficult on all of us that are responsible for managing those applications to have an optimized license position.

[3:06] So how can we help? Customers have been coming to us for quite some time and lately they’re asking us for more and more help. They’re asking us to help them with their usage analysis and doing an impact analysis. So for example if a vendor wants to go from concurrent floating licenses to named user licenses, what’s the impact on the organization from a license position and mainly cost, right. So a lot of customers have been surprised because you put your budgets in for next year in advance and then the vendors come up and make these changes and there’s significant impacts to your organization. So they’re asking for help with how they can simulate agreements, whether it’s a change in license type or if you want to go from regional to global or some hybrid thereof. Data mining, contract reviews, etc. And so the reason we’re getting this is either they’re saying they don’t have enough resources, everybody’s being asked to do more with fewer people, or they have new people in the job that just don’t have the experience. So this is the perspective that we’re coming from. We’ve been helping customers do this more and more. In addition to that they’re asking not only for help in understanding the usage but also behind the scenes in terms of managing a solution, or maybe it’s managing their license files or helping them with specific dashboards or forecasting, etc. So a lot of experience comes into this and I’m going to show you some of those examples just to kind of get you to start thinking about how you do that.

[4:47] We’ve been doing this for quite some time, over 20 years. We were founded back in 1999 and really we were originally consultants. So the founder of the organization worked inside of, effectively, an end user customer and was working with their homegrown tools in a consulting capacity, and actually they collaborated to develop our flagship product if you will. But since then we have been expanding those capabilities as well as the consulting piece of that. We are headquartered in Houston, Texas but have physical offices across the world, in Houston, Mexico, Oslo is where the parent company is, Japan, and the Philippines. And we have coverage worldwide in region so we can support small to extra large global customers in whatever region you are across the globe. The industries that we serve, that we have experience in, these are just the top industries. Nowadays you’d be surprised at all of the different vertical industries that are using engineering technical types of applications, but these are the more common ones and so we have a lot of experience in that.

[6:08] So when we talk about harnessing the usage information, that can take on many different forms. So you can see the list here and read it, but sometimes we want to look at data by location. You might have a contractor entitlement that says you can only use the application within a 25-mile radius of your physical brick and mortar. Sometimes we want to look at, again I mentioned earlier, simulating an agreement. What happens if I change from regional to global, or go back down again? What does it look like when I’m looking at usage trends, etc. So this can take on many many different forms and a lot of it has to do with the license type in your contract or the entitlements.

[6:59] The other thing that customers have been asking for help in is understanding, so a lot of organizations, everybody has a different way of handling their budgeting and forecasting. Some go to department heads and ask them, hey how many are you going to use, what’s going on, what projects do you have coming up, etc. And they pull that information together, but they want to be able to get better at it. So not only do they want assistance in forecasting based upon historical usage, but also in how well they’re actually forecasting. So being able to measure and report on that, to say okay here’s what you thought you were going to use but here’s what we actually ended up using. That will assist you in getting your forecast more and more accurate as time goes on.

[7:47] Another component I mentioned earlier was being able to look at usage by location. So I gave you one example, another example would be if you want to look at, these happen to be all locations in the US but this could be anywhere. So helping you understand, you want to be able to cut this data so that you can look and see, do I want to go from regional to global? Or what we see now as kind of a hybrid, so maybe you have a concentration of users in a particular region and you’ll do a regional agreement there, and then a smaller subset of your total usage is rest of world and then you’ll go for a global agreement there. And so what are those cost differences? Because we all know that a global license costs significantly more than a regional, which costs more than a named user. So being able to cut that usage data is critical in understanding what’s going on and being able to do those various different impact analyses or simulations.

[8:44] Most people have access to this data, again some folks are doing it manually. You can log into the individual license managers and get how many do I own versus how many are in use, but those are the only two data points they’re looking at. So it’s really important if you can to look at more information. The more data points you get the more well-rounded view, I like to say it’s like a 360 view. So in this example we can see we own seven, we use seven, but that doesn’t really tell us the whole story. Were there denials? How many? How long was that seventh license used, etc. So down here we can see that that seventh license was only used 0.67 hours during this reporting period, and so that clearly tells us we do not need to purchase additional licenses. But could we possibly reduce? Here we’ve calculated for you the 99th percentile and the 95th percentile, so then you can determine, if you have projects coming up maybe you want to stay here at the max in use, or we refer to it as business as usual, or if you’re doing a divestiture maybe you go down here to the 95th or 99th percentile. But again you have all of these data points to be able to do that impact analysis.

[10:02] And that’s what we’re going to look at here, so here’s the whole portfolio. The CFD prep post was the feature we were just looking at. And so as I mentioned, business as usual, what that refers to is just taking your license position to what’s the most you ever used. Why pay for licenses that you never use during the previous year, or maybe even three years of a contract. So this would take you to that position as business as usual, or there would be zero impact in your organization from a licensing perspective. And then you can calculate what that percentage of savings is. From there, as we showed previously, you can look at the 99 and 95th and what that impact is. Now I’ll tell you typically it’s not like you just pick a column, that’s typically not how it works. You’re going to pick and choose again based upon the individual features and what’s going on in your organization. I’ll tell you what I see the most frequently, the more expensive the application, the more the customer is likely to say, you know, I can tolerate a few denials. But I do have one customer who says I don’t care what it costs, money is no object, I don’t care what it costs, I never ever ever want to have a denial. And most people fall somewhere in between. But being able to have this data allows you again to make an informed decision of what’s going on.

[11:36] So let’s look at another thing that most people don’t think about, and that’s a simulation of a time zone change. Now this becomes important when you have applications that are licensed using tokens. So here we’re looking at the usage information for a month and you can see it’s color coded, right. So the higher usage is spanning over the midnight time of the central time zone. We can tell a couple of things here, we can see that we’re not optimized, people are camped on the license or long checkouts during the weekends, we can see that here. But more importantly the way tokens work is there’s a token weight or value that gets charged every day, and at midnight or 12:01 then it’s going to charge another set of tokens. So here you can calculate what the optimum time zone is. So let me show you what we did in this particular example. We calculated the optimum time zone based upon the cost of tokens, and the token weight was in the European or London time zone. But you can actually calculate what that difference will be to your organization. So you can see if you make that change this particular savings would be $124,000. I’ve seen that number much larger, I’ve seen it smaller. But one of the things that’s so interesting is this is the simplest thing you can do to save money in your organization because the only thing this requires is you change the time clock on the license server where the license manager is that’s serving up the tokens. So this is super simple and you can again calculate what that impact would be to your organization and get it to a more optimized position. So this is some low-hanging fruit that’s really easy to do and you can implement it at any time.

[13:25] Now let’s look at MATLAB on the concurrent licensing model. This is similar to what we looked at before but this particular customer had been working on this diligently but they didn’t really have a usage tool, so they were able to deploy a solution to help them get more insight. So here we can see the savings ranges from 9 to 30 percent. I’ll tell you the analysts like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, they estimate the savings of using a usage metering solution at 30 percent, so that’s their generic industry standard, and of course we see this vary. This is a very conservative one. But this doesn’t tell the whole story because what we’re looking at here is the check-in and check-out of the license. We can obviously get some more cost savings or more optimized position. And I will mention it’s not always about reduction, sometimes when we do these analyses we see certain features or applications that are under-licensed, so it goes both ways.

[14:46] But it doesn’t stop there with just that check-in and check-out. Because if we look at the active versus the inactive ratio, then you can see that on this particular application there’s only a 60% active ratio. This blue line represents the check-in and check-out of the license and the red line represents the active usage. So looking at things like keyboard and mouse, but also looking at CPU and I/O. So even if your local workstation is idle, you shipped a job off, we’re still looking at what the true activity is based upon those parameters. And you can see that your savings potential goes up even more. So you want to be able to, if you want to go to that next level, it’s going from check-in and check-out or open and close of an application to the active versus inactive, what’s going on.

[15:40] Now this also helps you identify people who camp, that’s the term we use, long checkout or camp on a license. We saw that on the heat map where people just leave the application open at night and on the weekends. And so it helps you pinpoint those individual end users who need some education on how to more effectively use the license in your organization. If we drill down even further to the individual user, we can see this example where clearly they’re inactive the majority of the time. So here their active level is only 31 percent of the total license consumption. So again clearly a lot of room there for additional optimization of your licensing, and this typically leads to cost savings. Or I like to talk about cost avoidance, because that’s actually the bigger number. If you have new projects coming on, you’ve done an acquisition or a merger or whatever, being able to stop a purchase, you know, even if it’s approved and has budget, if you don’t need it, being able to identify that, the cost avoidance will actually be the larger part of your cost savings.

[17:00] So being able to identify that active versus inactive. We talked about tokens from a time zone perspective but when we look at reporting and impact, etc., we have to look at that differently. So this is an example, this happens to be a Power BI dashboard, you can do it in various different formats. But you want to be able to track and meter what your spin down is of the bucket of tokens that you purchase. These are typically three-year agreements and you want to be able to look at what your balance is, again your spin down, what your trends are from a daily token consumption perspective. You can also look at how many users you have, how many different hosts that you have, and you want to look at a year-over-year comparison. Because again most of these, it’s kind of hard, most of these contracts you have to project three years into the future what’s going to happen, and if you’re short and you have to true up, the cost per token is significantly more, the cost per day of usage. So you really want to get this right and the more usage information you have the more analytics and data mining you can do. So being able to do that month-over-month comparison, looking at daily session trends, what the consumption is.

[18:13] Let me give you another look at it. Here’s another view where we’re looking at what the different features are and then what is the most used feature by elapsed time, or we can see here it’s MicroStation, but the most expensive cost is actually the Structural Enterprise. So if we were live in this report you’d be able to click and move this around so you can look at the consumption per application, etc. You can also do some what-if analysis.

[18:53] Some of the vendors have in their contracts a filter, and some of them you can negotiate a filter or negotiate a larger filter. And what that means is if an end user checks out an application and checks it back in in a short period of time they don’t count it. So this is very common in a manufacturing type of environment, it happens other places too. But on the manufacturing floor they’ll open an application, open a drawing, what have you, and close it in a very short window. So here we were able to do an impact analysis if they were able to negotiate a 15-minute filter and what the cost impact would be. Now I’m going to tell you, regardless of what’s going on in your organization, when you go into these vendor analyses you want to have a list of what you want to accomplish in that vendor negotiation and you need to be able to identify what you have to have versus your nice to have. Filters, depending if you’re not a manufacturer, maybe that’s a nice to have, so maybe you give that up in negotiating, and that way the vendor feels like they won one point, right, and you’re getting one of your have-to-haves in exchange for that. So for example Autodesk has an automatic, you don’t even have to negotiate it, they have an automatic 10-minute filter, but other vendors have that as well, and again you can negotiate what that looks like, if it’s five minutes, 15 minutes, etc.

[20:26] Now Autodesk has recently changed their floating concurrent license. The change is moving around the globe right now, I think it started in North America, it’s been going on for a few years now. They had to move their drop dead date because of the pandemic, but they’ve gone to what they refer to as a named user subscription and to flex tokens. Now a named user subscription, people say oh it doesn’t matter, the vendors are telling you, not just Autodesk, generically the vendors are telling you, hey I’m making your life easier, you don’t have to have a license server anymore, and this is named user so you don’t have to worry about how many do I need or whatever, this is so much easier for you. But I’m telling you, you lose visibility. They do have some reporting in the portal, it’s not nearly as detailed, so you want to combine that data with your usage information. We have some customers who use it to validate the reports coming out, not just from Autodesk, from all types of vendors, when they’re in a consumption type of agreement. But they also have, if you look at what their true usage is, because they have the flex that’s for occasional users, those are tokens. Maybe if somebody really was using, opening and closing it when they were actively using it, maybe they don’t even need a named user subscription, maybe they could get away with flex tokens. So looking at that data, you want to be able to look at elapsed time, you want to look at user days, you want to look at the days since last used, and then calculate how many of those users should have a named user subscription versus the flex tokens. And of course the more you buy then the less the price per token, so if you can estimate what that is, this is another way you can harness the usage data in your organization.

[22:42] The other thing about this is you can look at a collection versus a single feature. So let me click here. We’re looking at the AEC collection, and pretty much the rule of thumb is if you use two or more features then it’s less expensive to purchase the collection versus the individual. Well we can see in this customer example that the bulk of these users are just using Revit and they really shouldn’t have an AEC collection license, they really should be licensed for Revit, except for a handful of them. And even if you see usage on two applications, if we look down here at Donald Kelly for example, he only had 0.02 hours on AutoCAD. So in that instance you would still say you should have a Revit subscription with tokens for the Autodesk usage. Does that make sense? And so some of these that are very low, like Carolyn with this very low usage, and Diana Cruz, they probably shouldn’t even have a subscription, they should just be on the flex tokens, and then they can be assigned to them for Revit.

[24:01] So the next thing I have on here is days since last used. So you don’t want to keep licenses assigned, people move, they change jobs, they leave the company, whatever. And if you don’t have a workflow to go through, and most companies don’t, so don’t feel bad, I mean how do you, when somebody leaves the company do you even get notified? You know, is that in the workflow that you even get notified? They might get pulled in your active directory but no one told you to take them out. So you want to be able to identify those folks that are no longer using those licenses so that you can unassign them, and then they’re going back into the pool and will be able to be assigned to other people. So again, that cost avoidance. So this is really key in any named user agreement. And some of these named users, some vendors have them where they’re still on the network running off a licensed server, and some of them are host bound, and some of them are name bound but the license management is in the cloud.

[25:02] And then my last example I’m going to give you today is a license with a 30-day lock. So with this particular customer they had Anovia, and Anovia has a 30-day lock, meaning you open a license and regardless if you check it back in, that license is locked to that individual user for 30 days. So they can open and close an unlimited amount of time in that 30-day period. But then you want to look at your distinct user, but you want to look at it at a daily level, not at the annual level. So here we can see this customer had a lot of licenses, they had 8,326 licenses. And if we look at the cost per line item we can see it’s not very much, it’s $250 bucks, probably most people wouldn’t even look at that right, I mean I’ve got big things to worry about. But I’m telling you, you need to be able to look and do this analysis. Because if you look at that distinct user count per day you only need 4,950 licenses, and that one line item represents over $800,000 in savings.

[26:13] So what I like to tell people is everybody ranks their vendors from spend, right, so top down, who are my top 10, top three, whatever, ranking your vendors from top spend. But you also want to look at the individual cost, because depending upon the vendor, some of these actual licenses are $50,000, $100,000, so you want to look at the individual license, put the most expensive, you want to look at those. But the other one is this total cost per line item. So if we multiplied out the $250 times 8,000, right, it’s a pretty hefty spend. So even though the individual cost is low, the total spend on that application is high, and so it prompts us to kind of further look at that to see if we have an optimized position. So on this portfolio it’s over two million dollars, and I’ll tell you that is not unusual, especially if you didn’t have any insights into the information previously. We all know how it works, you go into the negotiations and the vendors make their suggestions and tell you what you need. You need to be able to have your own data so that when you’re going into those negotiations you already know.

[27:25] I have one other example where an aerospace customer, the vendor was moving from concurrent to named user, and they had done their homework. And so it was going to cost, it was going to add three million dollars to the cost of their contract without any change in their usage. So they were able to bring that information into the negotiation and it changed everything. So they were able to significantly negotiate down the price when they moved to that named user agreement. So those are just a handful of examples, a lot of different kinds of examples of how you can harness usage data in your organization and what the impacts could be.

[28:06] If you need help, reach out to consultants. We are happy to help. There’s a 30-minute button you’ll see at the end where you can have a 30-minute one-on-one with one of our consultants. But helping you get an optimized position, again, it’s identifying so you have the right license for the right person at the right time. So are you short on licenses on some, are you over-licensed on others? And also being able to apply that cost component, because you don’t want to spend your time looking at things, a lot of times the vendors add additional features that may not have any cost to them, you don’t want to spend your time on that. You want to be able to look at those big dollar items so you can optimize that and get that cost reduction for your organization.

[28:54] Compliance, you know some of these vendors do do audits, and the compliance is a little bit different. We talked about the location compliance, but also for example on the named user subscription you can use that on an unlimited number of devices but not at the same time. So you need to be careful, and hopefully have some way to quickly identify, somebody’s at the office and working and they accidentally left their machine on, or didn’t think about a compliance issue, and then came home and opened the application again on a different host. And so that is a compliance issue in your organization.

[29:32] Cost savings, we’ve talked about that the whole time. You obviously don’t mind spending money, that’s how you make a living, right, you want your people productive, but we don’t want to pay for things we’re no longer using. And don’t feel, reach out and look for different people in the industry that have expertise that can help you and assist you and complement your staff. And this is what I tell everybody, it all starts with metering, it all starts with the data. So if you’re not doing something today I’m going to say start now. Figure out how you can start now so you can fill the gap of that information in your organization.

[30:18] So that wraps it up for today. And I know Mae talked about opening it up to questions in the chat, but apparently when we set up our GoToWebinar the chat option is not turned on. So I’m going to tell you, if you have questions, because we can’t unmute you either because it’s in a webinar, if you have questions I’m going to ask you to please send me an email. Here’s my email address, it’s lcole@openit.com, and we will get those questions answered. And then as we mentioned you can schedule a 30-minute consultation with me or any of our other consultants or solution architects and we’d be happy to talk about your organization and what’s going on.

[31:05] And Mae, I’m going to kind of preempt you here so I’m calling an audible. But one of the questions that we get, and I’m just going to bring it up here, is people say well what do I do if I don’t have a solution, I don’t have a tool, I’m not, I don’t have any way to meter this data, can I still do this? And the answer is absolutely. We can help you, you don’t have to have our products for us to help you, but they certainly help. It is a very manual process when you don’t have a solution in your organization, but if you have some other solution, ours or anything, we are happy to assist you and you can do it even without a tool. So Mae, I’m going to turn it over to you to close it back out again. I’m just going to encourage everybody, send me an email or set up a one-on-one with me or any of my colleagues and we’d be happy to take your specific environment and your specific questions and help you and maybe point you in the right direction. I really appreciate everybody’s time.

[32:05] Mae: Thank you very much Linda. We just have one question here from Facebook. Yes, it goes, what are some key performance indicators or metrics that can be used to measure the success of data-driven initiatives?

[32:30] Linda: So I would say first and foremost it’s the license efficiency. In other words, when we looked at what percentage of what you own versus the percentage of business as usual, what is the ratio between that. And then if you want to take it to the next level, of course, what is that ratio between the active versus the inactive. That’s probably the most common KPI or key performance indicator that we see that customers are looking at to understand how effective they are at having an effective license position. We can certainly look at different components. Some people do it around the license camping, so pretty much you can put a metric on anything and different businesses have different cultures and they use different metrics if you will. But we’d be happy to talk about your specifics in more detail if you just send me an email or give us a call. But the most common one I would say is looking at that ratio between what you own versus what you’re using.

[33:48] Mae: Great question, thank you very much Linda, and that wraps up our webinar for today. It’s been a great session with you Linda, thank you so much. I appreciate everybody’s time and I hope to hear from you soon. And thank you also to all our attendees for joining today’s webinar. A quick reminder that this webinar is recorded and can be immediately replayed after this live stream, but we will also upload it on our website together with Linda’s presentation. We appreciate your attendance today. Please visit our website to view our upcoming events at openit.com, or connect with one of our Solutions Consultants for a free one-on-one consulting to talk about your specific environments. We are glad to assist you on your software optimization journey. Always be updated, follow us on social media. Once again this is Mae, your host for today. Thank you and stay safe. Bye everybody.