HEXAGON ISL: Nutzungsanalyse zur Kosteneinsparung

<p><strong>[0:06]</strong> <em>Dorcas:</em> Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone. Thank you for joining in today’s webinar entitled Hexagon ISL usage analysis to drive cost savings. My name is Dorcas and I will be your host for today. Hexagon ISL enables effective management of Hexagon’s product licenses, but its reporting features don’t provide a complete picture of the true license usage. In this webinar, Open iT solutions architect Linda Cole will show how granular license usage analysis can generate insightful reports and visualizations comparing usage against budgets and industry benchmarks. This approach enables better license management and substantial cost savings.</p>

<p><strong>[0:54]</strong> Before we get started, I encourage everyone to send in your questions through email at webinars@openit.com. We are also monitoring our LinkedIn and Facebook comment sections, and our speaker will address them during the Q&A session. And if we don’t have time or the opportunity to respond to your questions, we will reach out via email to provide you with the answer.</p>

<p><strong>[1:26]</strong> Our presenter has been an industry speaker since 2014, based in Houston. She is a high energy senior level consultant with more than 35 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. Currently she is helping clients solve their business issues around software licensing. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Linda Cole.</p>

<p><strong>[2:04]</strong> <em>Linda:</em> Thank you very much Dorcas for that introduction and welcome everybody to today’s webinar, which obviously the topic is Hexagon ISL. We’re going to do a quick agenda. We’re going to do a short history on Hexagon, kind of talk about just briefly how many different license types there are in that, which just adds to the complexity. We’re going to do a little deep dive if you will into looking at the usage data and how the consultants here at Open iT help customers to analyze that data if they choose to use us. But regardless of whether you have the Open iT solution or not, digging into the usage will really help give you a better picture. We’ll show you we have a lot of different data points to help give you a more well-rounded 360 view. We’ll kind of wrap up with best practices and questions. So let’s jump into it.</p>

<p><strong>[3:07]</strong> Hexagon AB has kind of an interesting history to me if you will. They were founded back in 1992 and they’ve obviously grown tremendously over that time. They currently have over 24,500 employees in 50 different companies. Their revenue has now topped $5.5 billion in US dollars, and I believe they’ve just passed up Autodesk from a revenue perspective, so quite large. But what I found really interesting was between 2000 and 2022 they’ve had over 170 acquisitions. I’ve got a few of them listed here but you can imagine licensing is very complex in this engineering niche that we’re in, this is our specialty, our sweet spot. But you can imagine bringing all of these different products and software titles in makes it even more difficult. For this particular vendor, originally they were licensed with a dongle, a HASP Hardlock license, and then they moved to a license manager using the SPLM license manager. But now what we’re talking about today is their new cloud-based license manager which is referred to as ISL.</p>

<p><strong>[4:28]</strong> So they have a lot of different licensing types in the ISL portfolio. The CS which stands for concurrent standard, CX which is extended, server-based, token-based, host bound, named user, etc. Those come in both a perpetual release, and you can move some perpetual over from SPLM, but any new licensing they refer to as a lease or a subscription. We’re really going to focus today on the CS versus the CX type of licenses. And for those of you who may not know, the CS or the concurrent standard, that’s a 12-hour license. What that means is your end users can open and close that application as much as they want during a 12-hour period. But what you’ll need to note is after that 12-hour period the license is locked for the expiration period which is an additional 12 hours. So in today’s analysis that I’m going to show you, we’re going to compare and contrast CX versus CS usage. And so you’ll see that a customer that had just CS licenses ended up using more of them because of the way their end users work, they needed more than 12 hours, versus that concurrent which is the 24-hour period. But how do you know what type of license you need? Obviously there’s a cost difference, and probably you need a mix, but every customer is different.</p>

<p><strong>[6:11]</strong> So when we get into the data analytics, what we see is not only is every customer different, you all have your own DNA, your own culture, your own business, how your end users use these various different applications. So you have to layer that on, but you need some data point to figure that out. Now what I recommend going into any true up or contract negotiation, the very first thing you want to do is figure out what are you paying for that has zero usage. So here, you just want to be able to have a report that shows, now some of these don’t have a charge to them, you know they come with a CS for example, but some of these do have a cost associated with them. But that’s the very first place you want to start. I can assure you when you go into that vendor negotiation, when you sit down with them and you show them a report that says here’s all of the applications I’ve been paying for but not using, it really changes the conversation. Because of course we want them to make money, we’re all in business to make money, but you don’t want to pay for things that you’re not using any longer.</p>

<p><strong>[7:26]</strong> So let’s look at this first and let’s talk about key stores for a minute. So in the Hexagon ISL, that’s a cloud-based vendor portal for the license management, and in there they have what Hexagon refers to as key stores. Now my first analysis with this was back about five or six years ago and the customer I was working with utilized the key stores to help segment their business. So they thought this is fantastic, so they had a different key store for all of their different groups or divisions. But what happens is when you have multiple key stores you have a tendency to not be optimized. So you might have more keys cut in one key store than you needed and then you might be short in another. So what we’re looking at today is combining those. So again at Open iT with our solution we have the ability to simulate various different combinations. And that’s what we can look at. So here’s an example of a combined key store if you will for a handful of applications, and we have the cost.</p>

<p><strong>[8:38]</strong> Now the other thing you’ll see with the licensing is they have all different types. So when you look at the contracts there’s some that are, if you will, kind of pay-per-use to me, so you pay for each usage of it. Some have a combination of fixed fee and then if you go over that, or burst over, whatever your designation was for your fixed fee, then they charge for that, and then there’s every combination thereof. So here we’re looking at, again this is just a subset of a portfolio, but we want to look at how many do we own versus how many do we use. And the other thing I want to mention that’s important is if you have a fixed fee component on your contract, I’ve seen them where they have quantities on them and I’ve seen them where they’re unlimited and combinations, etc. But regardless, when you get your license file, your license file is not unlimited like it is with some other vendors, it actually has numbers on it. So for them to have a price on your fixed fee bundle, right, they must be assuming you’re using a certain amount of product if you will. So it’s really important, the vendors will say oh we’re making it easier, it’s unlimited, it’s fixed fee, you don’t have to worry about it, but again you really want to know what you’re using so that you can negotiate a better price. No one wants to pay for things they’re not using.</p>

<p><strong>[10:01]</strong> So here we can see max available, that represents what’s coming off the license file, how many licenses you own, versus the max in use. So here we’ve just calculated, and we use the term business as usual, meaning if you changed your licensing and you just licensed at the max in use for whatever time frame you were looking at, this would be the saving. So this is pretty significant but this is not unusual, we see this all the time. So this one represents a 57% savings. Gartner, Forrester, IDC, it’s a 30% when you start digging into your usage analytics to optimize your license position, it’s kind of a minimum of 30. And we have customers, we’ve been in business over 20 years, and I’ve had this question come up, well okay maybe I can optimize the first couple of years but what about after that. We have customers that have been customers for 20 years, and the reason is because the vendors keep changing, and now they’re changing even faster. So they’re changing their entitlements, their license types, etc. So being able to have a usage tool and a solution, more importantly a total solution to help you, is really important.</p>

<p><strong>[11:13]</strong> So we do what we call a license efficiency. This is where we actually do the calculation based upon the actual usage, so we’re looking at how much time each license is used during the time frame that you’re looking at. So we calculate, again business as usual is just your max, but 99% of the time how many licenses did we need? So that’s what you’re seeing here in this calculation, and calculating the reduction. Now I will say you’re not going to ever, and we also have the same thing for 95, I don’t think you’re ever going to say oh we want a carte blanche 99% across the board or a 95% position. It’s typically you’re going to look at that and evaluate it for each of the different features or applications in your portfolio. But you need to be able to have these data points to make a more informed decision.</p>

<p><strong>[12:12]</strong> So let’s dig into this subset that I have today. So this particular license is a CX license, that’s that 24-hour license. And here we can see, we again own 35 but the most we ever used is six. Up here we have the distinct user count, so we have 28 users sharing 35 licenses. So if you only had these two data points, right, you could probably say since your distinct user count is less, I could probably reduce this. But would you reduce it to six, or where is the optimized position? So here we can see that 99% of the time it goes to four. You can see that fourth license, this is only three months worth of data on this example, it’s 23 hours. So we give you all of the different data points specifically. But we can expand upon that and say okay what was the individual user’s usage? So we can look at the timelines and look at the individual users and say, wow, okay, so this user, they almost hit 24 hours, so maybe they do need a CX.</p>

<p><strong>[13:23]</strong> In this particular analysis we set the threshold at four, meaning if they went over 12 hours four times, so that’s what we’ve calculated here, then we would recommend a CX license versus if they did not. We can see these first users, a lot of these never used the license more than 12 hours, so we’re recommending a CS license, and that’s what you’re going to see up here. So there’s a recommendation in terms of what the optimized position should be and what that percentage is. And so I’m going to go through several of these to show you because we can see different things with different applications.</p>

<p><strong>[14:10]</strong> So here we have Smart Instrumentation, we have again 35 licenses but 22 distinct users and a max of nine. If we look here it’s a little bit different because now we can look down here at this user Israel and we can see, wow, what’s going on here? How do we have more than 24 hours of usage in a single day? And that’s because he has multiple, we call it license hogging, he has multiple licenses checked out simultaneously. So those numbers add up. So again recommending a CX license for that particular user. But this is very customer specific. Some customers don’t allow their users to check out more than one, others limit that, there’s certain people based upon their job type and description that are allowed to do that. But sometimes if you have application servers this is not even intentional, so you can have a user go into an app server or terminal server, be working, and then they X out and close a window instead of logging off, and then it’ll create this situation. That’s not necessarily the case here, I’m just saying you want to be able to see the data to dig in to see what that is from a user behavior perspective. And so here we can see there’s some people that are hogging the license. But if we break this down the recommendation in terms of users, so this is a user count, we can look and apply that, hey maybe only 9% on this one need that type of license.</p>

<p><strong>[15:53]</strong> So here we have Smart Review. We’re looking again at the same data, max in use is much lower than what our max available is, our distinct user count is less. But here we’re going to see that same thing again where we have some users that are using multiple licenses, so it’s driving up. But up here we can also see where we have continuous 24-hour periods, it drops here and picks up again. This is what we call camping. Now this could be that this user is running a job, or it could be they just opened the application and left it open, right. So we want to be able to understand that so we can go train those users and make them a better steward if you will, that hey, if you’re not using it go ahead and check that license back in. So this one is a much higher percentage in terms of the recommendation but again seeing that, you need to look at that all the way down at the individual application.</p>

<p><strong>[16:56]</strong> Now again this was part of a fixed bundle, not super expensive, but 425 licenses, we’ve only ever had 44 distinct users that have utilized them, and they only ever utilized five. So even if that’s part of your bundle, being able to show the vendor, hey I don’t need you to calculate this many in my portfolio, I think we can come up with a better or more optimized position.</p>

<p><strong>[17:25]</strong> Now this one has a lot more use so this is a little bit different because here we have more distinct users than we have licenses. That’s great, that’s the whole purpose, we want to be able to share these expensive licenses. But we can see that the max in use is greater than the max available. Now this happens when you have a fixed component with a specific number and you’re allowed to burst over it. So the actual cost is going to change. So the first 100 that are fixed fee is one price but the 10 where you burst over is a different cost. Again you have to look at your organization to see if you want to have that type of capability. But we can see here that 99% of the time we only need 93, so it’s a business decision. I’ve actually had a customer that says I don’t care what it costs, they were not about cost optimization, they were like we don’t care what it costs, we never ever ever want to have a denial or somebody not have the ability to open an application when they need it. So again this is a business decision for each of the individual organizations. But here we can see we have some folks that have a lot of usage. Again you have to dig into that data to see are they running simultaneous jobs, is that the way you want it set up, that type of thing.</p>

<p><strong>[19:03]</strong> And then I think I have one more here with Smart Electrical where we have again a large number of licenses, a small number of distinct users, but we have the camping and hogging of licenses here. So this particular one is camping continuously on the license, where we have this other user that is hogging, meaning they’re checking out multiple licenses simultaneously. So with the Open iT solution we have all of those data points to be able to say how many simultaneous licenses. So that’s what we’re looking at here at the bottom of this chart. You can again look at what the usage is in elapsed time for each individual license. You can look at this granularly, this is looking at it at the day but you can go all the way down to the hourly level. So being able to mine that data out is going to be really important.</p>

<p><strong>[20:02]</strong> So this is just that same thing we looked at but I’ve added here the percentages. So if you just wanted a quick glimpse, when we look at these, the business as usual 99 and 95 in these percentages, that’s just on the raw numbers here. So if we were to convert to CS licenses from a CX, right, we can do the math. If you have the price of both, there’s even a bigger potential for savings. So this number can grow in terms of a percentage of savings or the dollar amount of savings. Maybe you want to take that and move it to another application or another vendor, maybe you want to take it to the bottom line, or a combination. But being able to see this, and again you want all your dollars to work for you.</p>

<p><strong>[20:49]</strong> Another example, this is a different one where these are all a different set of licenses. But let me just jump over. You want to look at zero usage, but I want to look at these two specifically that are CS types of licenses, so Smart Construction and P&ID, very different costs. But we have that same situation, the same type of analysis where we have business as usual, here we have that 30% versus the 99 and 95. Now if we look at this usage, oh sorry, here’s another way that you can look at that. We do have Power BI dashboards, etc., but people like to look at everything. So we have usage trends, this is the equivalent of that license efficiency where we’re calculating the 99 and 95, the distinct user, we’re drilled into that Smart Construction here. We can see the usage by the hour, by the week, etc., and then break it down into groups, divisions, cost centers, etc. But if we dig into this here it’s a little bit different, we have a very large number of distinct users sharing a smaller number of licenses. That’s typically what you want, right, because you want to get the most optimized position you can get. But even in this situation there’s 175 max in use, and 99% of the time we only used 148. So that’s interesting, right. So should any of these users be CX? Well in this particular customer, as I mentioned, if you have a CS it’ll lock after 12 hours. So if they need to use it more than 12 hours they’re using multiple licenses. I probably should have scrolled down on this to do the screen capture but this is a very large number of users. But what we see in the data is that there’s a large number of users that are using multiple licenses. It’s a different behavior, right, than what we saw from users using a CX license. So it’s kind of interesting to look at the data from that perspective and figure out, hey, do I need a combination, or you’re going to have to do the math, what’s the cost of a CS versus a CX license.</p>

<p><strong>[23:25]</strong> And here on Smart P&ID, again we have a larger distinct user count, and here we can see it much easier in this particular view. So we have this user where they’ve got a larger percentage or larger elapsed time, but you can see at one point they were using 70 licenses, right. Wow. So if that’s really the way that they need to work, we would recommend that you get them a CX license. There’s a couple of other examples here as well. So hopefully doing that compare and contrast, but I want to show you one other perspective. We drilled down into a specific user that was hogging licenses, and maybe they’re running jobs, etc., because we can see they used a variety of hosts for when they had those applications. So on some hosts they were using multiples at the same time, but again across the board you can see they were using multiple hosts for that single application across the time. So again we can drill down into that data and look at max in use, elapsed time, all the way down to the day and to the hour. So just another way of looking at the data and drilling into that just to figure out what’s going on.</p>

<p><strong>[24:52]</strong> So in summary today, I’m going to say this regardless of what vendor you’re looking at, first identify what you’re not using. Let’s look at that zero usage. And in Hexagon specifically, if you have some legacy perpetual licenses you want to make sure that you’re utilizing your perpetual licenses before you go to your lease licenses. Same thing, you want to make sure, now they have, if you have a combination of the fixed fee plus the overage, right, where you can burst over, there’s a true up that happens, most of them I’ve seen are quarterly. But you want to utilize your fixed fee licenses before you burst over. If you have the ability to collapse the key stores, as I mentioned the first one I did was like five or six years ago, and one more recently last year, they had multiple key stores because of acquisition, so they had acquired some different companies, and they were like oh this is great, we can keep them separated. But once they collapsed those key stores they were able to significantly reduce their cost of licensing. And the same could be said for divestitures, right, if you have something going on you can use that. So I’m not saying you only ever want one key store, I’m saying you want to make deliberate decisions about your key stores to help you have a more optimized position.</p>

<p><strong>[26:30]</strong> And then determine what type of license is best for you. It’s going to vary by organization, right, and how your users work and the types of projects that they’re working on. But be able to look at that data to determine if you can do that. Now this is again very customer specific, but do you want to limit it to one license per person? Or is the bulk of the organization, the users you want to limit to one, but maybe you have a small subset that, because of the projects they’re working on, they could do more. You know, you want to segment that out. You can really fine-tune, I guess that’s the message here, is to fine-tune the configuration of what your users are configured to use. Do you want to set hours for the CS type of licenses, and what that means is, pardon me, where you can say these licenses are only available from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM or 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM? But if you’re a global organization that might not work, you might need something else. And then actually look at those fixed fee bundles of what’s going on, because again they have to come up with a price somewhere, that price is coming from somewhere, so they’re making an estimate or a judgment on how much they think you’re going to use for them to be able to calculate what that price should be.</p>

<p><strong>[28:00]</strong> So that wraps up, I’ve only got a couple of minutes left but I’m going to turn it back over to Dorcas for questions before we close out. I really appreciate everybody attending today.</p>

<p><strong>[28:18]</strong> <em>Dorcas:</em> Yes, thank you Linda for your presentation. I’ve got some questions here from our attendees. Okay so question number one is, what about some of the other license types you mentioned in the webinar, do you have analysis on those?</p>

<p><strong>[28:32]</strong> <em>Linda:</em> Sure, we absolutely do and can help you. But you can see I barely had enough time today to go through all those different scenarios just on the CS and the CX. But let me just jump here, we have the ability, or you have the ability, to contact us for a free 30-minute consultation with one of our consultants. You can scan this QR code or just go to openit.com. So as I mentioned every customer is different, so please just reach out to us, we would love to have that discussion with you and can talk about your situation and look at examples.</p>

<p><strong>[29:12]</strong> <em>Dorcas:</em> Okay thank you. One more question. He says, what if I still have SPLM and Hexagon ISL licenses, how do you analyze that?</p>

<p><strong>[29:19]</strong> <em>Linda:</em> Yeah that’s a great question. We’ve done a bunch of analysis for customers who have both types of licenses and we have the ability to combine those. As I think I mentioned previously, I don’t see a lot of overlap at the feature level, but you still want to look at the overall portfolio level. And without making any changes we have the ability to combine that data so that we can look at the entire portfolio and do the same type of analysis. In terms of now it’s licensed different, right, it’s concurrent on SPLM versus this CS and CX, yeah, but absolutely we can do the analysis and combine that whole portfolio together. That’s a great question because I see that a lot, I see the combinations a lot. Typically new feature versions they’re forcing you, right, they’re all moving to ISL, but I’m still seeing a huge number of customers that have both.</p>

<p><strong>[30:26]</strong> <em>Dorcas:</em> Okay, all right, thank you. Once again Linda for sharing those insights and answering those questions. But before we wrap up this webinar, do you have any parting words for our attendees?</p>

<p><strong>[30:35]</strong> <em>Linda:</em> I just want to thank everybody. I’m sure you can tell this is my passion, is to dig in and analyze this data. So we really love helping customers understand what’s going on with their licensing. It’s so complex that it’s very difficult, it kind of takes a village if you will to do that. So I appreciate everybody’s attendance today. I hope you learned something and please reach out to us, we’d love to have a more in-depth conversation with you.</p>

<p><strong>[31:06]</strong> <em>Dorcas:</em> All right, thank you Linda. A quick reminder that this webinar is recorded and the recording will be sent to your registered corporate email address. And also be sure to join us again on our next webinar as we dive deep into usage analytics. Check us on socials, don’t forget to follow and subscribe, Open iT, Inc. Send us an email at getstarted@openit.com to get started with your software optimization journey today. Once again this is Dorcas, your host. Thank you so much and stay safe. Thank you everybody.</p>