Parte 1 | Nuevos tipos de licencias de Autodesk® y su impacto en su organización

[0:02] Mae: Hello everyone and welcome to the first session of Open iT’s live webinar series New Autodesk Licensing Types and its Impact to your Organization. My name is Mae and I am your host for today and very shortly our presenter Linda Cole will be joining us. Before we get started let me share with you a reminder that everyone is encouraged to ask questions you may drop your queries in the comments section and Linda will address it during the Q&A session of our webinar if we don’t have the opportunity to answer all the questions or if there are any questions that need further investigation rest assured that it will be sent to Linda and we will reach out via email or through LinkedIn.

[0:45] Our presenter is a Business Solutions Consultant for Open iT and has been an industry speaker since 2014 based in Houston she is a high energy senior level consultant with more than 25 years of diversified experience in sales, business operations, service management, project management, process improvement, marketing, and management in the technology industry. She is a proven leader with a unique blend of responsibilities in both small and large companies and possesses a passion for building successful businesses providing extreme value to clients currently she is helping clients solve their business issues around software licensing ladies and gentlemen we have Linda M. Cole.

[1:32] Linda: Thank you very much for that great introduction, Mae. And I’d like to welcome everybody, we have people joining us from all across the world so good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. We’re happy to be here today to talk about Autodesk Licensing. We’re going to go through just an introduction of the various different license types some of the potential impacts that are affecting your organizations today. We’re going to touch on some best practices on how you can manage those in your environment, and just a couple of examples and next steps to help you in your organizations. So let’s get started with what’s going on with Autodesk and their licensing.

[2:11] Historically there’s been a lot of different licensing types with Autodesk. A few years ago they introduced their Autodesk A360 which was a SaaS based licensing and that’s where they were trying to move everything to the cloud. The application the license management everything ran in the cloud. When I talked to most of the folks I talked to there’s very few folks that have adopted this, but it still is there but I think they’ve you know we’re trying to respond to that. We still have some standalone licenses out in the marketplace again when I talk to folks all over the world,

[2:45] both customers and prospects, some still have those standalone licenses which are host-based but the majority of folks have moved on or have some other type of licensing. In addition to that, now for our very large global enterprise accounts many of them are on the Token Flex and this still runs off of a licensed server but instead of checking out a license, you’re checking out a license but it has a token value associated with it.

[3:16] And that’s again for typically very large global enterprise accounts so we’re not going to really dive into that today but I wanted to mention it because it is a big license type that Autodesk does and in our subsequent webinars we’ll be touching more on that so concurrent licensing is what most folks have around the world and that of course is where we have a licensed server. That’s checking out the applications and various users can check the applications out, they check them back in, check them back out again it’s a floating license or concurrent license is what it’s called in your sharing so multiple users are sharing single licenses.

[4:04] Well I’ve got a little hiccup here in my slide, I apologize for that. So several years ago, Autodesk introduced what they refer to as Named User Subscription. And that is exactly what it sounds like so instead of being a host bound license type, now your licenses are attached to a specific user and so each individual user has their own portfolio.

[4:31] Now when they originally set this up, there was some advantages they thought from a compliance perspective. We’ll talk about that in a minute, but when we look at that, it really has some impacts because now instead of having a pool of licenses that can be shared across your environment, each individual user has to have their own portfolio or their own named user subscription.

[4:54] So what we see today is because they introduced that a lot of your demand over the last couple of years, Autodesk has had you by Named User Subscription so a lot of you have this combination of data which is Concurrent Licensing and Named User, so you haven’t made the whole switch over to Named User Subscription, of course some of you have, but it really adds a lot of complexity in your environment when you’re trying to understand what’s going on across the entire enterprise and how can you optimize your license position with this. Now in addition to that Autodesk has made

[5:31] some changes some additional changes in their licensing, and they have done several different things to that SMB and large customer market. One is, they’re now providing incentives to go direct. Resellers are still available across the globe however, some products are only available direct or some licensing models or licensing types are now only available directly.

[6:00] In addition to that, they’re converting all of those concurrent maintenance and support or Multi-user Subscriptions to Named User Subscriptions now they’re giving you options here of monthly annual, or multi-year, but most customers are being forced into this new licensing model, they are offering some trade-ins originally these were being the expiration date on your maintenance and support was back in 2020, but due to the pandemic and things that have been going on some of those expiration dates have extended and now we currently have an expiration of 2023. But a lot of that just depends on when your existing Multi-user Subscription or maintenance and support contracts are expiring. They are still offering a one trade-in so for every one concurrent license you can trade that in for two Named User Subscriptions. Now the problem with this is

[6:55] Autodesk says that’s our average ratio that we see to customers, but that is not what we see. We see that most customers have many more than two people per one license in their concurrent floating license model. So it creates an impact against your organization now the other thing they have that’s brand new, it’s only been there about been out a couple of months, is the new Autodesk Flex Licensing and this is to target those occasional users and I’ll go into more detail about that in a minute. And then they also offer discounts on a multi-year or three-year subscription.

[7:33] So on the Named User Subscriptions, as I mentioned they have three different terms that you can do. One is a monthly subscription that is only available to purchase direct, so you would not be able to use your current resellers to do that but this is a great alternative if you have any short-term projects in your environment, if you have, let’s say you have interns that come in over the summer or over a break, you can instead of having to purchase additional licenses for them that sit dormant the rest of the year you can use these monthly subscriptions to handle that temporary flux. In addition, of course you have the Annual Subscription which is less expensive if you multiply it out so it’s about a 33% savings over the monthly subscription, and as I mentioned there’s discounts if you go to a multi-year or three-year subscription.

[8:29] So under the Named User Subscription you have various different deployment options, but you can the applications are still running on all the individual desktops or virtual desktops wherever they’re doing their work, you can do that individually or you can script it for multiple. But it can be installed on up to three devices. Now here’s the big the big problem with that is you can only have one active session running at a time. So when they first rolled out Named User Subscriptions you were actually limited. So let’s say you have a user that is working in the office, and they have an application open and they leave it open, and go home then they either work on a home machine where they have the application running, or let’s say they VPN they have a virtual desktop, or what have you so originally they were not able to open that second license if you will on a second device. But they have removed that restriction so it’s important that we’re able to educate the environment all of the users of these products to understand that the licensing is for one active session at a time. So otherwise, you’re going to be into a compliant situation, and no one likes an audit. I’m sure several of you here have been through one and let me tell you they’re no fun. So we want to make sure that we’re educating the environment on what’s going on and what that license entitlement is on the new Named User Subscription.

[9:57] The renewals are handled via the Autodesk portal, so if you already have Named User Subscriptions, you’re familiar with this. But those of you who aren’t, there’s an actual Autodesk portal that you have. You can log into and this is where you purchase, renew, do account assignments, etc. They do have an option that if you set up an auto renewal you’ll get a 10% discount on your renewals if you pay in advance. And then they have, if you have a multi-year subscription. Let’s say you have a three-year the other advantage or incentive to doing a three-year subscription is that they will maintain that price without an increase over the term of that. The Named User Subscription entitles you for the current version plus you can go back three versions so if you’re working on a project, and it and you know now it’s your two or three you can still stay that’s very important for a lot of people they want to stay on the same version while they finish up a project. So this will entitle you to cover three versions back on the Named User Subscription.

[11:03] Now I mentioned that Autodesk Flex is a new licensing model that just rolled out a couple of months ago, it is not available in all regions of the world yet. But this is really targeted for occasional users, and as in Token Flex basically there’s what we refer to as a token weight or a value that gets assigned to each of the products and you can buy a bucket of tokens to use for these occasional users. Now with Autodesk Flex,

[11:33] these bucket of tokens you purchase, it has a 12-month expiration date, so it’s use it or lose it, but the larger the batch of tokens that you buy then it does a reduction. The current rate for the tokens in the US is three dollars. That is a different rate in different parts of the world, so you’ll want to check locally what the cost is where you’re at if they’ve rolled this out yet. So effectively, it becomes a pay-per-use and the other thing that’s different about this is that they expire after 24 hours so once you open an application it’ll ding you for that number of tokens and you have access to that license you can open and close it as much as you want during that 24-hour period and that’s the fee you’ll pay is just that token weight for that particular product you have. So the advantage of this again it’s aimed at those occasional users so you only pay for what you need and it’s easy to calculate what you’re going to need with the usage data.

[12:33] And there’s also no penalties for purchasing additional tokens. So in the in the enterprise, Token Flex world you have a multi-year agreement, and if you run out of tokens then you purchase more and the cost per token is much higher. In the Autodesk Flex it’s just based on the quantity of tokens that you buy. In each purchase or each bucket that you do. So this is a great alternative again for those occasional users the applications are still running locally but it’ll it handles that transaction up in the cloud in your Autodesk portal.

[13:12] So as I mentioned there’s a token value if you will for each of them, and I’ll show you a list of those in a minute, so when users open an application it checks out that number of tokens again from the cloud and there’s a dollar value associated with that, so it’s easy to track what the costs are of that. So this is all public information on the Autodesk site, it has a list of all of the different applications and what the token cost or token weight is per day, and then you can calculate it. As I mentioned, it’s a use it or lose it during that 12-month period.

[13:46] And even if you only open the application for five minutes, it’s going to consume that token value for that 24 hour period. Now, Autodesk does have a token calculator online but basically they expect you to know how much you need and it just does the math for you. You know if I need x number of days on this application, what does that look like in terms of tokens. So you really kind of have to know what you need before you even get to that calculator. But we’re going to show you some other ways that you can look at that your usage data to help you with that calculation. Now it’s very easy to calculate what the what I call the break-even point. So if we look at the token cost versus the annual subscription, we can easily count the break, calculate what the break even is. So for example, let’s say we look at Civil 3D, the cost the token cost per day is nine, so if we look at the cost of the subscription versus the cost of the tokens, if you have users who are using have unique user days is the term we use they use it more than 90 days out of the year then it makes sense for you to purchase a named user subscription. But I think you’ll find in your environment. If you’re looking at the distinct user days that you have a lot of users or a handful of users who don’t really qualify for a named user subscription. Now I do want to mention that not all products have tokens. So the collections like AEC, product design, etc. They are not available in a token setting. Those do require a named user subscription and not all subscriptions are available in token. So there’s some things that you can

[15:31] you can again the AEC collection is probably the most common one where you have to buy a subscription. But what you want to do is you want to look at if you have users who are today currently using an AEC any of the collections, you want to look and see which particular applications in that bundle are they using so if they’re only using AutoCAD, you don’t want to purchase a named user subscription for the collection you want to. Just give them an Autodesk Named User Subscription. So it really changes the matrix and the makeup of how you assign your applications. When you move through here, but if you have some reporting then that makes this much easier in terms of managing your licenses. So the other thing is, in the what hasn’t changed, is in the collections they’re not adding up all of the cost of all of the applications that are available in the collection so there is a unique or substantial discount if you purchase those collections if you’re using more than let’s say three of the applications that are in that collection.

[16:40] So because you can calculate that break-even point again we can say well this number of users can use the pay-per-use you know Autodesk Flex tokens, and these users can use named user subscription.

[16:55] Now in addition to named user subscription, they have something referred to as premium services. Originally this was only offered to companies who had a minimum of 150 users or named user subscriptions to qualify they have reduced that recently down to 50. The big thing this provides is single sign-on and so if that’s a requirement in your environment then you’re going to have to sign up for the premium services the problem is here in the US, that’s 300 per user per year so it’s pretty expensive. It does give you some additional things like 24×7 live support and it gives you some basic usage reporting but it is pretty basic. They do have they’re coming out with a new version of this as well enterprise but they haven’t put all the parameters around that yet, so as a we’ve been talking about the whole time Autodesk is making a lot of changes very rapidly so that’s why we’re here today to help you keep up with those changes.

[18:03] So the first and foremost, what I hear from everybody is this is a huge unplanned cost increase. So as you do your budgets and forecasting, you know you’re looking at your maintenance on your concurrent and you budgeted it for the next year. And now all of a sudden you have to convert.

[18:21] And as I mentioned, most most people I talk to, they have more than a one to two ratios of how many distinct users they have sharing their existing concurrent licensing. so that creates a big unplanned cost in your licensing. We of course, as I mentioned, have potential compliance issues, so you have to pay attention to only one active session as well as the region of use. So just like with your concurrent licensing, they have regions assigned to them and that typically is where a lot of people get tripped up in an audit where let’s say they have a North American server and they have a global server, but somebody from rest of world you know the license wasn’t available globally so they check out from a regional server, that would be a compliance issue. So that’s you know again the potential that you’re you’ve seen in concurrent and it can also affect your named user subscription. Now another thing, if you go and buy direct, your payment methods are going to change so currently, Autodesk accepts credit cards and Paypal. They also do the electronic transfer the ACH they do have financing. But many of you are used to your current workflow or process in your organizations as you cut a PO you know it goes you receive an invoice you have terms it runs through your normal workflow at your organization. So this is going to be an impact your organization how are you going to manage that and it also encourages shadow IT behavior. We have a recent customer who they actually had 12 different Autodesk portals because different regions and groups in their in the enterprise had done their own purchasing so then they all had their own Autodesk portals nothing would they couldn’t even see it they didn’t even know what all they had of course you can do an inventory to see where those applications are installed and then you’ll have to figure out if you’ve got more than one Autodesk portal so changing payment methods and going direct and using these portals can encourage shadow behavior shadow IT behavior and so you just want to put a plan together in advance to handle that workflow so that you can keep control of that.

[20:44] The other thing is you lose visibility of your actual usage so if you have concurrent licensing whether you have a usage metering tool or not you have access to that information through your license manager and you can look and see what the elapsed time is how much are your end users consuming a license right so you have some limited visibility once you move to the Autodesk portal you can absolutely see what all you own what your license what you own you can see what licenses have been assigned to various different users if you also have the Autodesk Flex you can see your bucket of tokens but you can’t really see whether people are using the product or not.

[21:33] So the other thing that may be an impact to your organization is this requires connectivity. So if you had an environment where you were letting your users borrow licenses so they would check them out and borrow them and take them off network you can still do that in the named user subscription but you have to be you have to have internet connectivity when you first open the application and you first connect to that Autodesk portal and then you can be offline for 30 days. So if you have people out in the field you just need to be mindful that they will have to have some type of connectivity every 30 days and if they’re utilizing tokens that’s every 24 hours so that could again be some impacts to your organization and require some changes on how your end users are utilizing those licenses so for my best practices what do we recommend first and foremost it’s to

[22:29] consolidate all of your Autodesk portals into a single account if you’re just now moving to named user subscription you won’t have to deal with this you’ll have a single account but as I mentioned because what’s happened is so if you were on the concurrent licensing model and your contract wasn’t up and you needed to purchase any licenses the last couple of years you were purchasing these named user subscriptions because they weren’t allowing you to buy any more perpetual licenses so now you have a combination of licenses between the concurrent and the named user so again those named users they could be on multiple portals etc you want to go to a single account you also want to align all your subscriptions and payment dates luckily Autodesk allows you to do this and it’s fairly easy in their portal however you have to adjust the subscriptions to the same term so if you have one subscription that said a year and another one that’s at three years you’re going to have to adjust them all to three years to get to the same expiration date they do allow you to prorate that so you can pick and put everything on the same expiration date but they also have to have the same payment method as well so aligning your subscriptions and payments is is doable but you have to do a little bit of work to get it there if you’re in an area that does not currently offer Autodesk Flex we do not recommend that you convert 100 of your concurrent users to named user subscriptions we suggest that you look at your data look at the usage of those applications and see do you have any of those low usage occasional users and then you can create what I refer to as a swap pool so maybe you have maybe it’s your bottom 10% of your users maybe it’s 20% everybody’s different and what that looks like but Autodesk does not restrict how frequently you can change those so you can assign a license to user a today and you can move that assignment to user b tomorrow so the licenses are not locked in any fashion you can actually move it same day it doesn’t even have to be the next day so if you create a pool of licenses you can swap those licenses out as they’re needed by these occasional users it is it is kind of manual today but depending upon your organization like I’ve got you know you see some manufacturing where they do very short

[25:02] short usage on the floor if you will and so as they roll through a new project or turn up a new line things of that nature there’s all types of things and all the different industries of why you might have these occasional users instead of having each one have their own named user subscription let’s just use a swap file until they roll out that Autodesk Flex or pay-per-use in your area the other thing that’s important is to review your usage on a monthly or at a minimum quarterly basis you want to make sure you’re identifying those users who are assigned a license that are no longer using it so you want to look at the date last used you know did they leave the company is the project finished did they transfer to a new department where they no longer need that license they’re using something else so it’s important that you do that and there’s different metrics you can look at you can again look at the last they used and then drill down into that to see what changed in the environment etc

[26:05] so I mentioned that when you have these combination of licenses it makes reporting even more difficult because now you have you have a list of standalone licenses maybe you have your concurrent licensing which you can get some reporting on but and you have named user so we need some way to do that to look at all that data and combine that data so we’ve done that in a Power BI Dashboard where we’re able to look at all the different data types across the entire portfolio and then drill down into it we’re going to go into much more detail on this on subsequent sessions but let me just give you one quick example so let’s say we click on AutoCAD but remember I told you we can look at the actual distinct user days we can look at how much their usage was we could look at elapsed time we can look at all kinds of things but and based upon that break even point we’re able to calculate what is needed in the environment so

[27:10] here in this particular example, we selected AutoCAD only 47 do we suggest that you actually have a named user and that you have a large number of users in this case that are doing the Autodesk flex and then based upon their historical usage we can actually calculate the exact number of tokens that you’re going to need of course the more tokens you buy the cheaper the price per token and so in just this one example if you were to convert all your users to subscription you know it’s 760 000 versus a combination of named user and Flex it’s only 161. So you can see there’s a huge impact to your organization when you’re able to dig down into this information to really understand what’s going on and what you need to move forward in your organization and as I mentioned we will go much deeper into this in our subsequent sessions but for today I think that’s gonna let me go to our Q&A session. Mae, do you want to

[28:12] Mae: moderate me for questions thank you so much Linda for your in the presentation all right so we have several questions here from our attendees and we’d like yes we’d like to read the first question from Yogesh is Autodesk flex type similar to subscription-based licensing of MS?

[28:36] Linda: So no Autodesk Flex is just a think of it as a pay-per-use type pay-per-use type of license and you’re paying by the day so they’re good for 24 hours but you know it’s like pre-paying for so many tokens and then each one so if you go to a carnival maybe you pay so many tickets to ride a ride that’s one analogy I would use but it’s not I mean we can say it’s subscription-based in that it has a 12 month term but really it’s think of it as a pay-per-use on a daily basis

[29:14] hopefully that answers if not chat some more in here and and let me just say if if we don’t get to all the questions we’re absolutely going to follow up with you after this webinar and we’ll definitely answer every single question even if we’re not able to do it live

[29:30] Mae: okay our next question is from Jim. Hi, Linda since it sounds like flex is for short-term users would Autodesk try to get an organization on Token Flex currently to move to named user subscriptions?

[29:45] Linda: I have not seen any I have not seen that yet none of our customers have reported that they currently have the enterprise token flex and that users that Autodesk is trying to get them to move they’ve just been renewing their enterprise token flex agreements who knows what’s going to happen as we move forward as I mentioned it’s moving very rapidly they’re their their licensing is changing but with that new edition that’s coming up on the enterprise version they may be leaning that way

[30:20] Mae: thank you. And from Brian is Open iT planning on being able to track licenses that are hosted by Autodesk cloud versus in-premises like my company currently has

[30:35] Linda: yes absolutely, Brian we have the ability to meter any of those whether it’s standalone concurrent or your cloud-based and we do connect directly to the Autodesk portal we’re continuously adding capabilities to that as we speak but we’re able to take the data from the Autodesk portal and marry it up to the usage data that we’re collecting locally to provide some advanced reporting so absolutely

[31:04] Mae: you Linda and I think that wraps up our Q&A. Thank you so much, Linda and to all our attendees for joining our webinar today and since we’re running out of time we’ll just send the questions to Linda. I’m sorry if you have more questions please don’t hesitate to send your questions to our email address which I will give to you in a while, so a quick reminder that this webinar is recorded and can be immediately replayed after this live stream. We will also upload it on our website together with Linda’s presentation. We are once again inviting you to the next two sessions of this webinar series, please register through the links that are shown on the screen or visit the Open iT LinkedIn page to add these events on your calendar.

[31:51] Please feel free to invite your colleagues and friends to join us and send your questions in advance if you wish, to our email optimizeautodesk@openit.com. See you virtually on our next sessions, this is Mae, your host for today. Thank you and stay safe. Thank you, bye! Bye!