Gestión del uso de licencias en el entorno de la nube

[0:00] Lynn: All attendees are in listen-only mode. Welcome everyone to the Open iT ITAM webinar, managing license usage in cloud environments. My name is Lynn Weiss and I’m from ITAM, going to be your host today. And I have with me Carl Leweke, who is an account manager from Open iT, and he’s going to be your speaker. But before we move forward in the webinar I’d like to announce a few things. Open iT will make the presentation available to everyone in PDF after the webinar, and also the recording of this event will be on the ITAM website. For those that are members, you can stream it live in the future at any time. If you’re not an ITAM member, of course you’ll have to become one in order to listen to it in the future. To ask any questions of the presenters, just click on the question or the chat box and we will try to get to all the questions before the end of the session. If we don’t manage that then I will forward this information over to Carl and his team and have them address your query via email afterwards.

[1:21] So everyone, the first thing I’d like to do here is to introduce you to our speaker, Carl. He is, like I said, an account manager of Open iT. He has been in the oil and gas industry for over 26 years in many capacities. His industry experience mostly includes management of deepwater wireless accounts including operations planning, contracts, market analysis, forecasting, account analysis, client relations, and billing and payments. He employs his broad understanding of deepwater offshore operations to advise clients on how to utilize technology such as software metering, optimizing application usage, maximizing asset value, and user productivity. So to get things moving I’m going to turn the microphone over to Carl.

[2:09] Carl: Thank you very much Lynn. Hello, as Lynn said I’m Carl Leweke with Open iT, and just like to thank you for joining us today for our presentation and thank ITAM for hosting us. It is a complex and emerging technology in the cloud. There are a variety of subjects and numerous different aspects of cloud usage, clouds, and cloud licensing, and many of those could really be presented as their own independent topic. And cloud could mean many things to many different people, and this became especially apparent in our peer reviewing process. But I’ll try to bring the variety of these many different concepts together here and shed new light on the possibilities for understanding and managing the rapidly changing aspects of software availability as related to the cloud, and just hope you gain new insight into what is possible.

[3:06] So again, my main background is in oil and gas. I had a lot of experience in trying to help people manage data acquisition systems and software and interpretation software. My background for education is electrical engineering and an MBA from University of Denver. But just to take a quick look at today’s agenda, to look at the cloud licensing, the different models that are available, the various licensing models that can be in the cloud, how to mix cloud services and licensing and software with on-premises for a holistic benefit to your organization. There’s probably a right mix for everybody and finding that is not so easy. In addition to just looking at how to best manage licensing in the cloud, we’re going to have to look at some cloud considerations for chargeback. That is a very strong, powerful metering, the use of metering in order to manage things, combining cloud and non-cloud metering and the benefits of that. And then of course we’ll do some summary and Q&A.

[4:24] So in just a quick introduction to the cloud service models that are available, just a number of different things that are available. There’s what we call XaaS, which is just about anything, X being the variable, in the cloud. A lot of software licensing has moved in the cloud direction from a number of different software vendors, for instance Oil, Autodesk, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft of course, and then Amazon, as we’ll see a little bit later, is certainly one of the premier providers of cloud services. So just looking at the basic models that are available, there are a lot of different models that are available for consideration. We’ll look at some of the most popular to start with and the amount of control that the software purchaser has over these various models varies. So if you’re purchasing just infrastructure it’s possible to manage just pretty much everything of the environment except for the actual hardware. For platform-as-a-service you can really manage the applications and the data directly. But for things like SaaS you really can’t manage any of the cloud aspects of what’s going on directly. So that means that there are different approaches that are needed for managing the different types of cloud that you may be using.

[5:45] And complicating the situation significantly is this variety of things and possible mixture of things. But it also needs to be noted that infrastructure and platform situations do introduce the possibility of actually implementing traditional metering components, if there’s a metering system that’s flexible enough and under your control to actually meter that and bring the data together. So again there are a lot of different things you can look at. It seems like for a while there was a new one coming out every month as far as the different types of things, licensing as a service, monitoring as a service, storage as a service of course is very popular as well, just cloud storage of various things. So again, all of these are available in various models with different types of controls and different capabilities that need to be understood. And of course for any given environment, everybody’s got their own needs that they need to play off with what’s available and what they choose to use.

[6:47] And which cloud provider are people using? I know that there are a number of them out there, Amazon, HP, Azure, Google as well. I think that Amazon, as I mentioned earlier, is pretty much dominating the market, that’s what most of the surveys said. And this is actually an on-site survey from one of our previous seminars that shows that 67% of the people there, and that’s typical of various surveys, were actually using Amazon.

[7:18] So I’m going to go into software licensing methods just a little bit, just to make sure that we have a solid, common background understanding, because it does play into what’s possible in the cloud and what needs to be considered in the cloud. So just going back to some of the traditional models, of course there’s the named user model where you’ve got a certain person who’s assigned the right to use certain software in the license agreement and that’s applicable only to that person. There are various network, wide area, and local area licenses that can be floating licenses or shared, and that can be either for a region or global, those are commonly known as concurrent licenses. There are node-lock licenses which is where the software is installed on a specific machine and then it can only be used by someone who’s actually on that particular machine. There are per-user-per-device licenses that are based on the number of concurrent and distinct devices that can access the software simultaneously. Subscriptions where the license is only available during the period that’s been purchased and then it’s just limited to that time period under the agreement. There are cloud-based subscriptions, and these have grown greatly in popularity among software vendors recently, and in some instances they actually use cloud credits, a specific type of, you might call it a cloud Bitcoin or a software Bitcoin type of thing, where you actually purchase it off of the measurement of what you’ve used using those cloud resources.

[8:43] There are a couple of different types of free licenses that we can talk about. They do vary in what the original software maker allows you to do, even though they’re free they don’t allow you to do just anything you want. What we call a GPL or general public license does allow some sharing and copying but there are some limits to what they’ll allow you to do as far as reselling. There are some what they call client access licenses which use both user and device metrics, they allow users to connect to the software using the various features and functions under the limitations of the numbers of devices and the numbers of users. And these just get more and more complicated as you go. And then there are mixtures of them as well. But some licensing actually goes off the capability of the hardware. There are some licenses for fonts, it may be useful to at least understand that they’re there. There’s freeware which again is something that’s free but the limitations usually say that you can’t resell it. And of course if you’ve got software that’s free doesn’t mean you can do anything you want with it. And of course combinations of things.

[10:02] But determining the right mix based off of these large numbers of models, and these models really trace back to the beginning of software development and marketing, in the cloud environment it’s important to understand what the advantages and disadvantages of each of these are, the various trade-offs that need to be weighed for the advantages and disadvantages with getting the various license forms and agreements. But cloud capabilities have added significantly to the number of factors that you need to consider when you’re choosing the proper mix. For perpetual licenses, which is something that’s been traditionally very popular, where it’s a purchase, it’s a big upfront expense, these can be less expensive over the long term. Again they do require what would usually be considered a capital investment and they can represent a value, it’s an asset. And especially some perpetual licenses seem to be losing favor with some software vendors, so those previously purchased assets can have a special value if they could no longer be purchased, rather than being forced into some type of subscription agreement in the future.

[11:07] Versus perpetual licenses, flexible licenses is a wide variety of other kinds of licenses. It’s hard to find the proper term for them but flexible is probably the best way to describe them. And they can be various types of subscriptions and time-based or usage-based licenses. They can vary greatly. We already talked about float tokens a little bit under the licensing agreements. But what they can allow you to do, since they are more flexible, is to scale up and scale down much more quickly for transient uses, for peak usage, those sorts of things. They can also allow kind of a test-it-before-you-buy-it or drive-it-before-you-buy-it like you would for a car. They can allow you to run the software and do some evaluations on it before doing a major implementation or a major purchase. But the bottom line is that it’s really important to understand the long-term costs and the short-term benefits that can apply for each of the various types of software you’ve got, the various environments you’ve got in your particular organization. Understand those and plan appropriately.

[12:11] It’s just with the new complexity there are more costs and unfortunately that does require more planning. It’s important to understand the emerging software capabilities that are out there for the types of software you’ve got for your particular company. You need to understand your user behaviors and how readily they’ll tend to adopt technology or new technology. It’s important to understand the lifecycle of your current software and the mixture of the lifecycles of your current software and how replacement of that is going to go. There’s a lot of homework and it’s kind of a no-pain-no-gain situation unfortunately.

[13:00] So one of the things that I’d like to talk about, especially as we talked a little bit about the flexibility of licensing before, is something that Open iT has done with a company called ANSYS. And it’s just a good example of what’s possible. So there are of course the on-premises and private cloud commercial cloud platforms where you can actually install your own software. And then there’s of course software as a service which makes it more difficult to measure it directly and have strong control over it. But it’s worthy to note that some software vendors, in this instance ANSYS, have recognized the value of assisting their customers with this whole process. So ANSYS, in case you’re not familiar with them, is a full line of advanced and very powerful engineering solutions. It’s a very popular software in the engineering and design environment. They’ve worked with Open iT to develop a system that merges their cloud and on-premises licensing to allow a purchase of additional capability for periods of what they would consider extraordinary use, or use above what they consider the usual average base level. So what this also allows customers to do is monitor their usage over the same system that meters and charges for the ANSYS billing, and that reduces in many instances the anxiety over unexpected charges. Because as most people who’ve started to move into the cloud environment understand, just getting those surprise charges that our systems implementations, people spun up cloud instances of things and they weren’t even on the radar of IT to start with. So just getting your arms around everything that’s going on with IT and all of the usage that’s going on, even for the things that you understand, is very important. And when these types of systems are implemented by a vendor, then you can monitor the full gamut of all the types of usage. And that’s the reason Open iT was chosen to partner with ANSYS, our ability to combine different types of usage, something that we call true use, into one integrated bill. They chose us for that strong capability to merge different types of information from different places.

[14:54] So how do you meter and account for cloud usage? We’ve already looked at some aspects of this. Certainly infrastructure affects how you’re going to be able to do that. We’ve already mentioned private cloud, public cloud, you’ve got local systems that you’ll need to look at, and there could be a number of different software vendors in the cloud. So the challenge of course is to optimize for all of the different environments. And one of the ways to do that, of course, if you’re using cloud, especially if it’s SaaS or something that’s being metered in the cloud, is to just use the detailed statement from the cloud provider. So Amazon is certainly one of them, they’re very popular, and it is possible to integrate their statements directly.

[15:35] But in the past we’ve also looked at possibly implementing ways to meter the actual network traffic directly at the routers, multiplexers, or whatever you want to call them these days. Putting agents on the actual machines where the people are using them can have advantages over decoding the network, or it may be another way to decode the network. And also monitoring what’s going on in the browsers is a potential way to do that. So just quickly looking at this, this is a typical AWS Amazon Web Services invoice, and of course you can import these into a system. It may take a little bit of homework to build something to parse this into your actual system, but it’s very possible to do. And I believe I’ve heard in some previous cloud seminars that I’ve been to that it’s possible to get an even more detailed, like a CSV format or something like that, that can be imported into spreadsheets or other various systems in a common format.

[16:43] So the drawbacks to this, it seldom breaks it down to the end-user level and of course getting insight into what kinds of projects or anything else that may be associated with any given usage is very difficult to do. In addition there’s no true usage, so if you’ve got things going on in the cloud as well as maybe on-premises for the same types of software, then it’s impossible to merge that altogether using just one of these statements.

[17:07] One of the other ways to do this would potentially be agents in the cloud. So as we talked about earlier, if you’ve got infrastructure or platform as a service, then it’s possible to potentially install your own metering agents if you’ve installed software there for people to use. And that certainly has a capability if you’ve got the right metering agents available. So what you can get is very finely grained, very detailed information, the same as you would if you had installed it in a local system. And many use the same agents internally. And if you’re using them all from the same system you can integrate them as well, and that’s what we call our true use. So the drawback is of course in many instances you’ll need to install this software in the cloud, it’ll have to be the same type of software that you’ve installed usually in a local system, and that may have some costs associated with it.

[17:59] Monitoring network activity is another way. In the past I’d say that this capability is going away but if you could monitor the actual packets and monitor their destinations and those sorts of things, you could actually determine the amounts of time. If you’ve got heartbeats for a given process that’s running in the cloud then you could monitor that and determine the amount of time that a certain user was using things based on that. That’s becoming less and less possible, it’s the complexity of modern networks. And I’d say not even the complexity, just the daunting volume of data is making it very hard to do that. But if it’s encrypted you pretty much are not capable of looking into those packets and determining where they’re going or where they originated or anything else anyway. So this is something that can not be ignored completely, but more and more it’s just not going to be possible to get activity measurements based off of network activity as it was perhaps in some years past.

[19:00] As we talked about a little bit earlier, the same types of agents that you would deploy in the cloud for a metering system can also be done on desktops and application servers where the licenses are being sent out to users for them to use. And you can get a lot of insight into what’s going on based on just who’s checking out the licenses and when. And as far as understanding the activity, of course you can integrate that all together. Having an agent in the browser is another option, just monitoring when a given, setting up an API of some sort to monitor when a given browser is going to a certain website, basically a software website or using it for that particular software that’s in the cloud, either SaaS or in some type of a privately installed cloud. But there are a lot of different browser agents out there and getting your arms around what’s going on with each one of those, as well as the fact that for any given website there may be a number of different URLs or IP addresses that could potentially be used to kind of backdoor through there, maybe intentionally or maybe just by accident. There’s probably some limitations that need to be put in if you’re going to try to monitor what’s going on with software traffic or SaaS types of things that are going on just through the browser alone. But it is possible to do that.

[20:34] And of course if you’ve got the full gamut of all the things that can be done, it’s probably preferable to look at what your real needs are, what your real capabilities are in your given environment. Again, this is unfortunately very context-driven and there’s probably not one out-of-the-box solution for everybody to get a handle on everything that’s going on in the cloud. But by generating a combination of different things that offer insight, the vendor activity reports are going to be important, probably first. Putting agents in the cloud if you’ve got infrastructure or platform type of setup is another very strong way to get really good usage data. Of course looking at application servers and license servers, and as we just talked about, agents on the desktop or in the browser. And then integrating that various information together to come up with something that’s as holistic a view as possible of all the usage, which is possible and can be developed if you’ve integrated the proper technology.

[21:37] So let’s take a look real quickly at the role of chargeback in managing the cloud. So if you’ve gone through the trouble of setting up a metering system, then to really get the best use out of that information and manage usage, chargeback can be a very useful and powerful tool. So the whole idea of chargeback, just real quickly, you’re taking all the various costs that are generated and initially you’re paying bills, but then using some type of metering or some type of a metric to put that cost back to the cost centers. And of course there is going to be a process to this as far as collecting the raw data, altering it and organizing it by group or by time period and those sorts of things, applying a value or a pay-per-use value to each of those individual types of costs that were generated, doing the cost calculations, and then creating invoices to redistribute. So there’s a process to it.

[22:41] And the cloud-based options are certainly, as we’ve stated from the beginning, changing the complexity and many of the dynamics of understanding what’s going on with software and software licensing. And the actual cost of the applications is just hugely more difficult to determine. This is not news to anybody, there’s any number of organizations out there that have been surprised by a rogue bill, shall we say, that snuck up and hurt them very badly at any rate. But anyway, implementing chargeback can raise the awareness. And then this is just a typical traditional Gartner model for ways to do chargeback. They say that you can do it by functionality, which is sort of a base capability, if you need access to something you pay a flat rate for it. You can do it by use, which if you’ve got the metrics for the various types of use by department or user or those sorts of things, we recommend, as a metering company, we recommend to weight that rather heavily. So they’re showing sort of a weighting at the bottom, their recommendations. We would certainly recommend, if you’ve got the data, that it’s more equitable to use usage charges as a much higher percentage, minor in the access and service level models versus the actual metering of what the use is.

[24:03] So there are a number of ways to do chargeback. You can, as I said, charge everyone sort of a flat rate, or you can do it just on a pay-per-use basis where you integrate the usage times the time for any given time period and apply a cost to each time period. Or you can do it as a flat rate plus a differential, where everyone pays for a base rate and then any of the use above that gets charged at a variable rate based on the metered usage. And that’s sort of the elastic modeling that we had talked about previously with respect to how ANSYS is doing things for their elastic licensing. And there’s a number of different ways to meter things. If you’re metering the usage of something you can do it off of the elapsed time or users and devices or combinations of those types of things. If you’re metering storage then that can be based on the quality of storage, the access speed, or the type of storage whether it’s physical disks or solid-state types of disks. The amount that’s being stored of course is going to be important, the read/write frequency, how often it’s being accessed or changed. So there are a number of different things that are possible with charging back for things in the cloud.

[25:14] And of course there’s a process that can be implemented for that. You want to plan the process with goals in mind, create a service catalog and define it. Usually it’s preferable to test that model on last year’s data to kind of get an idea how well it’s working, whether you’re getting the kind of results that you expected when you develop the cost model, and then deploy it and of course monitor it over time to make sure that it continues to work as you had planned. And there are some other overall goals for the organization. Of course you want it to be easily communicated and understood, simple and transparent, and of course equitable so that people feel that they’re being charged for what they use and not being unfairly charged for things that they maybe didn’t get any value out of. And of course there are a lot of benefits of it. Just making organizations and people more aware of the costs is going to breed accountability. And recognizing the costs that are associated with the things they use from an IT standpoint causes them to recognize the value of it as well. So there are a lot of benefits to it.

[26:20] So there are some other questions and some other best practices that we need to look at. So there’s a question, why not just echo the cloud bill to the end user? Well if you’ve got internal and external cloud type resources, or just internal resources as well as cloud resources, if you’re only charging for the cloud resources then the people who get there, the early adopters or the people who check out to use the resources early, actually get a benefit from that. And the other people may feel that it’s unfair that they were charged more. If you’ve charged only for cloud usage, then it’s as it says, they’re being the unlucky one thrown out into the cloud while the other ones are kind of getting the easy way out.

[26:59] So mixing cloud and on-premises chargeback, we’ve talked a little bit about this and the way that ANSYS is doing this using true use. There are a number of ways to look at chargeback of cloud resources. If you’ve got an enterprise chargeback model, and I think that this is becoming more and more prevalent over time, recognized as a best practice for software asset management, that enterprise chargeback model, it’s best to integrate the cloud modeling and treat it just as you would any other on-premises cost. Of course you have to make sure that you can read the cloud invoices or that your metering systems all speak the same language as your enterprise chargeback system to integrate those in properly. Very important to have that strength in your metering and the detail. Get as detailed a statement as you can from your cloud service providers as well. The advantage of course is you can create your own policies and enforce those to the best benefit of your organization. And again, just making people feel that they have a share in being able to contribute to the organization by using things efficiently.

[28:13] As always, and as we said before, using last year’s data and have the flexibility to adjust it as needed. Another best practice that’s been recognized is just to take occasional users and move them to the cloud. That can be a lot more cost efficient if they’re only paying for the time that they use versus having someone with a named user license or a dedicated license or an expensive perpetual license type of resource. And if you’ve got information for things like the days since someone last used a software or the amount of elapsed time that they’ve used it in the last certain period of time, then that can be very useful for identifying who best fits the model for using cloud type of resources versus on-premises type of resources.

[29:09] And there are some other things that need to be paid attention to. If you’ve got a cloud user, let’s just call him Superman, and he’s got a limited professional license, and what you didn’t know is that this guy also has another username that you didn’t recognize as being the same person, Clark Kent, and he’s also got a professional license that costs even more, that’s an on-premises type license. Then you need to watch out for those. The double licensing situation is important, and I think that’s already been recognized for anyone who’s done any work with SAP optimization, it’s recognized as a very important aspect of it, to get a handle on your usernames and make sure that there aren’t double usernames with double privileges.

[29:50] So another thing to get a handle on is what we call at Open iT license hogs, which is people who use a lot of resources at the same time. So if you’ve got a combined view of your cloud and on-premises usage in the same location then it’s easier to determine these, as people are using both types of resources. So what you can see here is a report that’s typical from our system, just shows some ANSYS software and some user IDs and the number of maximum licenses used at the same time and the elapsed time. So what we can see here is we’ve got this user who’s used 8 to 10 licenses at the same time during a couple of different months. And it’s important to understand the user’s profile as well. I mean this may be a power user who’s doing huge numbers of simulations and they actually do require these resources. But it may also be that they check out a license, forget to check it back in, and then check out another one the next day. And as a result of that they’re just over-consuming the resources. So understanding that and guarding against it, trying to drive user behavior especially through chargeback, is very useful.

[31:01] So the conclusion is, just assessing and understanding the needs for your particular organization can allow you to optimize the on-premises and cloud mixture without creating a huge mess where there’s so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of it all. There needs to be an organized, engineered approach to it. Using a chargeback assessment to determine how it’s possible and determining the best ways to integrate cloud usage with an enterprise chargeback model is important. And again we’ve already talked about how that reinforces good behavior within the organization and people understand the value of their prudent use of resources. Cloud metering, of course the vendor statements, get it in as detailed a format as you can from your particular vendors, especially for SaaS. If you can get the detailed reports from them that’s very useful, as well as deploying metering agents to cloud instances where there are on-premises instances, where you can monitor what’s going on in a browser with particular URLs or IP addresses to tell when people are using cloud resources.

[32:16] And it’s also important, not to be underestimated, to start looking at what your organizational needs are now. Planning for how you’ll move forward into the cloud environment or transition to cloud software as needed, and it’s important to start collecting data early. If you’re going to do chargeback, something that’s important to do is just show people what their charges are before you actually implement the chargeback system. That can also be significant in driving behavior. If managers understand what the usage in their department is before they’re charged for it, they’ll probably feel that the process was a little bit more fair. And of course having the flexibility to adjust over time for changing needs, or recognizing when things maybe weren’t done right the first time. So that’s pretty much it. If anyone has any questions I’ll be happy to discuss them at this point.

[33:10] Lynn: Thanks Carl. We’ve got a few questions here so let’s get right to them. And like I said before, if we run out of time and we do not get to your question, please be aware that I will make sure Carl gets the information and he’ll respond to you via email or maybe even a phone call. So this is something that we hear a lot within the ITAM organization, do you find that organizations think that going to the cloud will eliminate the ITAM team?

[33:43] Carl: I’ve heard a lot of discussion at various conferences and I don’t think that anybody has any delusions frankly that that’s going to happen. I mean people, what people realize is, a lot of them go to the cloud thinking that it will save them money, and I think that most people have moved away from that view. They realize that there may be some advantages to cloud, but if you’re not careful, reduced costs isn’t one of them. And of course having things in the cloud, and it looks like the cloud is coming to many environments whether people want it or not, that’s an unfortunate thing in some instances, but I think it’s an emerging trend in software in general, and that’s just going to require more management in general. So I don’t think that people really think that that’s going to eliminate the teams that manage those sorts of things.

[34:40] Lynn: I completely agree with you and I couldn’t have said it better. Another question, what are your thoughts on BYOL, how it works with Amazon Web Services?

[34:48] Carl: If you’re bringing your own software and your own license then it certainly is possible, you know, to put a metering agent if you’re doing like a platform as a service or infrastructure as a service on AWS. Then it’s also possible to implement a monitoring system in there. If you’ve got an actual license server in the cloud on AWS or something like that then you can actually put an agent on there to meter what’s going on with that. And I presume that’s the question. Any more detail and you’d have to talk to them about the individual license that they were talking about and the software itself.

[35:51] Lynn: Will there ever be a single tool which can measure usage of on-premises as well as various cloud and software as a service platforms? Do you think there’s ever going to be one tool that’s going to do everything?

[35:59] Carl: Unfortunately I would have probably thought that yeah, the answer to that could be yes, but I think that unfortunately what we’re seeing is that at the rate things are changing, it’s a moving target. So it’s probably unlikely to be able to bring all of that together. And things are just getting more and more complex in ways that we couldn’t foresee five years ago, certainly not ten years ago. And so even if you’re planning to try to build a system like that back then, as things change over time it gets more and more difficult to pull all the various concepts together, to look at the various types of modeling and ways of charging all together and get a handle on them. Also at this point I think that’s not feasible. So you’ll probably have to manage the most important aspects of the usage as best as possible and there’s probably some things that’ll slip through the cracks.

[36:58] Lynn: Okay. Do you find that organizations are using tools such as yours to optimize, or just to use them to remove software within the organization? Are they actually doing that?

[37:08] Carl: So there are a number of different ways to do it. Just removing is certainly a small portion of what people use our software for. You know, they really look at, because without some sort of a management metering tool it’s hard to recognize changing patterns. You know, is a certain software increasing in its usage or decreasing in its usage, or has it almost completely stopped being used? Are there situations where you have plenty of licenses, the right amount of licenses, or in some instances are there a lack of licenses for software that would be very cost-effective based on the productivity of people just to have more of those particular licenses? And understanding where people are limited in their capabilities with new software based on metering, I think, is a very important aspect of it. And that’s not even looking at some of the more advanced ways of optimizing, which is to actually meter, if someone’s got a license or if they’ve checked out a license, are they actually using that license? And if they’re not, can you take some action based on that? So there are a lot of things that people are using our software for, for optimization, other than just removing licenses.

[38:24] Lynn: Okay. In your opinion what’s the first step in setting up a system to monitor usage in someone’s cloud environment?

[38:32] Carl: So the first step really is going to be to determine what your environment looks like and try to do an internal assessment on your own mixture of things. And I may have already mentioned to identify the biggest things first, but to look at your own environment, determine what the most important aspects are and what the potential ways are of getting monitoring and metering in order to try to manage the usage of that particular aspect of it. So that’s really where you start, and then building a system over time and adding more capabilities to it as you get a handle on the most important things. Those are probably the first two steps really in trying to get things cranked up and started.

[39:22] Lynn: Okay. I think we’ve got time for one more question. We already have a metering tool for management of our floating licenses. Can that be modified to include monitoring of cloud software as well?

[39:36] Carl: In some instances it can. And as I’ve probably hammered through the entire presentation, with cloud there’s such a varied possibility of things that can be there that it’s a case-to-case basis in many instances. If you’ve got platform or infrastructure as a service and software installed there, or license servers installed there, then you can also put metering agents there and integrate them into a metering system. And some of those, if you’re trying to measure things just out of a browser and trying to tell what’s going on there, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. But integrating all of that various information into one system is possible, it’s just in some environments it’s going to be very challenging versus other environments.

[40:37] Lynn: Okay. This one is a multi-part question and maybe just an opinion. Which works better, do you see it in a cloud agent, is it on-premises, or in the browser? What has been your experience of what works best, and is it dependent on the type of software you’re looking at? What are the basics there?

[40:51] Carl: So it’s much easier to get a handle on what’s going on on-premises. We’ve done some basic monitoring through the browser but again, if there were only a couple of different browsers available and maybe only one URL to access something then it can be relatively easy to do, this still does take some work. But if you can limit the different types of browsers that people use and the different types of URLs or paths that they can use to get to a given cloud software resource, then it is possible to do that. It’s not necessarily all out-of-the-box for any given environment. Versus on-premises, which is much more strongly established over a period of time, decades at this point, versus cloud and trying to measure what’s going on in the cloud especially with respect to browsers and a proliferation of people’s favorite browsers.

[42:00] Lynn: Okay great. And I think we’re going to have to wrap it up now, that’s all the time we have at this point for questions. So if anyone has any additional questions, Carl, if you would advance the slide to your contact information, they can write directly to you and email to Carl or to the Open iT organization themselves. That is great. And I want to thank everyone for participating in today’s webinar, especially our speaker Carl Leweke. And as stated earlier we will handle all additional questions. I think there are a few here that are going to take a little more explanation than what we can do in five minutes. So the recording itself will be made available early next week from the ITAM website. And remember, if you want a copy of this presentation you’ve got to reach out to Open iT, but I’m sure they’re going to make that information available to everyone that attended through an email following up this webinar. So everyone, thank you again and this concludes today’s presentation.