SolidWorks: Seminario web sobre estrategias más inteligentes para ahorrar en 2025

[0:00] Nix: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone. This is Open iT Webinar SolidWorks Strategize Smarter for 2025 Savings. My name is Nix and I’ll be your host for today. SolidWorks is used by top engineering design and manufacturing firms for their projects. However, effectively managing software licenses and costs can be challenging.

[0:25] In today’s webinar we will delve into how we can gain visibility into license usage and make informed cost-effective decisions with real world data. Before we get started, I’d like to let everyone know that we’ll have a Q&A session. We encourage everyone to ask questions by dropping them in the Q&A tab at the top and we’ll tackle them later. If we won’t have enough time to answer all the questions or if there are any that need further information, we will send them to our speaker then we’ll reach out via email or LinkedIn with the answers.

[0:57] Now our presenter for today is based in Houston, Texas. She’s a dynamic speaker who delivers practical insights on software license optimization, engaging and equipping audiences to tackle real world challenges with confidence. With 35 plus years in IT and leadership roles like general manager, she brings deep knowledge in business management, P&L oversight, virtualization, and cloud infrastructure. For over 10 years here at Open iT, she has helped clients optimize software licensing and achieved substantial cost savings through software usage metering. Everybody, let’s welcome Linda Cole.

[1:35] Linda: Thank you very much for that introduction and welcome everybody to today’s webinar. Today’s agenda, we’re just going to focus on SolidWorks today. We’re going to just briefly look at license types and really I just want to spend some time showing you some customer examples and different ways to look at the data to help you optimize your license position. Right at the end of the day I always say, if you’ve been to any of my webinars, you want the right license for the right person at the right time. But how do we do that and how do we figure that out? What data do we need to look at? And then we’ll just wrap that up with some strategies on how to approach that and a Q&A section as she said. So please, if you think of questions just put them in the chat and we’ll answer them at the end.

[2:22] So let’s start with license types. Now this is the third in the series of vendor webinars I’m doing and this is the easiest if you will from a licensing perspective. SolidWorks is very simple, they have network and standalone licenses, term and perpetual. Now they do have a new offering which is a cloud-based and it’s a little different because it’s actually a SaaS option. Today we’re going to be talking about networking and standalone but did want to let you know they do have some new license types coming in. And of course you can do concurrent or standalone, they have different packaging levels. And so you can see if it’s standard or professional premium, as you layer on, with most companies as you layer on, these packages go up in cost, they’re laying on additional features. So very simplistic compared to a lot of vendors these days, straightforward license entitlements, but it still makes it very difficult right at the end of the day. We still need to again understand what we’re trying to do.

[3:32] So in this first example, what’s a little bit different is this example has multiple servers running FlexLM license manager that are serving up the licenses. And what we’ve done here is simulated what that would look like if we had a global license server. So we want to see holistically when we go into these negotiations, whether it’s a midterm where we’re reallocating licenses, if you have that in your contract, or it’s a new renewal contract, I always say let’s start at the top and look down. So here we’re looking at max available, which is what do we own across all of these different applications or feature sets, and then we want to look at how many did we use. Now this particular data set we’re looking at year-to-date, so this is 2024, and we can quickly see several things. One is we’re going to add on the denials and we can say here that our SolidWorks has a huge number of denials right. So this is one thing that I hear from customers is they have so many renewals it’s hard for them to focus on everything. So they really need the ability to quickly identify, instead of just looking at one particular application in a portfolio, they would need to be able to quickly identify. So here we can see yes we can look at our SolidWorks and yes we have some denials and we need to go look and see what’s going on because it’s not that we ran out of licenses. So what’s going on? But you also need to identify those features or applications that have zero usage. If there’s a fee associated with them, why am I paying for things that I’m not using?

[5:22] But we’re going to drill down. The first thing we’re going to do is look real time, right. What’s going on with my licensing right now. And nothing sticks out other than we have four people who have a reserved license, right. So it’s not enough to explain why we have those denials but we want to be mindful of that, and if we want to be able to drill into that to see, hey, is there a particular reason, is there a location where they’re reserving licenses? Does it make sense? Because it’s incredibly costly. The whole concurrent licensing mechanism is a shared cost metric, right. So when you reserve a license you’re effectively blocking it from anybody else using it. So you want to be able to see if there’s any reason, are these legit? Because again I see this, customers say, wow, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t realize that we had people reserving licenses and then that our business, that doesn’t really make sense. In other businesses that’s their model, right, they have people out in the field, it makes sense for them to reserve licenses. So we just want to be mindful of that.

[6:30] Again we’re looking holistically top down so we can kind of see what’s going on. If we look at a usage trend here, we can see a lot in a single view. This top line is how many you own, we already saw numerically that we’re not using that. This blue line is the usage, the red bars are the denials, and this is the elapsed time. So what this is, again graphically showing us, is hey we’re not even getting close to the number, using the number of licenses that we own. But why do we have all these denials sitting here? Now remember we’re simulating if we had a single server, but what this tells us is that we need to look at the individual servers.

[7:19] The reason it’s important to start here is because if you only look at each individual server you’re going to go to the server that’s throwing all these denials and you’re going to say I don’t have enough licenses, I need to buy more, right. There’s a huge denial thing going on there. And so that’s why you want to start here at a top down because really all you need to do is reallocate or load balance those licenses across them. Now every vendor is different, it depends on what region of the world you’re in, it depends on your contract, but you want to be armed with all of these different data points so when you go into your vendor negotiation, right, you can have this discussion. Because if you’re only looking at that one server they’re going to say you need more licenses, you’re like yeah but I have all of these that I’m not using and haven’t used all year, so why would I buy more, right. So it helps you to have that conversation.

[8:19] And we can look even further with some additional information. This is the same information, right, we own 29, we only use 16, but we can actually calculate, you know, how much was I using 99% of the time or 95% of the time. And of course we want to look at that detail, not just the numbers, but okay how much was that 16th license used. So again we’re looking at almost a year’s worth of data, that 16th license was only used for one hour, right, 1.42 hours. So clearly we can easily reduce our license position without any impact in the organization. And I would argue that you could go even further down to the 14th because again, 73 hours over the whole 11 months that we’re in is not much at all.

[9:14] Now this of course is very customer specific. You also can’t just look at this one report and make that decision, right. What’s going on in your environment, what’s your culture, you know, are you doing any acquisitions, is there any change. Let’s look at what’s going on. But you want to be able to have a tool, have something in your organization, even if you’re manually getting all this information, to be able to determine what your effective license position needs to be.

[9:46] Now here we’re looking at it, I’ve simplified it here on a weekly version instead of a monthly, but we’re looking at that usage, that same usage and percentiles. But again we can quickly see a couple of things. One is we have license campers. What that means is we have people that are checking out a license and just leaving it checked out, right, 24 hours a day. And what that does is obviously it prevents others from utilizing that license when they just camp on it. So we have some room for optimization. That goes back into, let me just go back to that previous slide, that goes back into here about trying to determine where that effective license position is. Okay well now I’ve even got more confidence that I can license further down because if I address these license campers, setting up alerts, right, user alerts to address their behavior to help them be better stewards, then I can even reduce my license count even further.

[10:47] Now below this is the distribution of denials. It’s important to see, if we just look at that one number, right, it’s kind of alarming, wow we have all these denials, I must need more licenses. But this is why it’s so critical to look at multiple data points, because you need to know did they all happen at one time? I mean, what’s the distribution? Is it multiple people, is it multiple servers? What’s the denial reason? Because you can have denials for all kinds of things, it’s not just because you’re out of licenses. So you need to validate and normalize your denials, and look and see, is there a particular person that was just sitting there hitting enter, enter, enter, and so their denial count is running up? You need to be able to look at that. Many times I’ll look at this and I’ll just see, this one’s got a pretty good dispersement of denials, but when I’m working with clients and doing their analysis for them, right, it’ll have one or two hours in one day out of the whole time, and so the denials ended up being an anomaly. So you can look and see what does that look like.

[12:00] And I recommend you look at it all the way down to the user level. So the first thing this tells me, number one, is these folks that have denials, right, everybody was able to still work, right, not necessarily during that single hour, but you can look at this on a daily basis and so we can see whether somebody truly was not able to perform their work. Because I know that’s another thing that customers say is my phone’s ringing and people are saying they can’t do their job and then the department managers are calling, and in reality that’s not necessarily the case. So you can look at user heat maps with a denial component as well. But I wanted to point that out. But then I wanted to point out this example, right, where we have a couple of people here with high elapsed time. Here, part of the reason is because their max they used is two, so maybe it makes sense in your organization, maybe it doesn’t. Is there a reason that they need licenses checked out simultaneously? And did they camp on those licenses? Because again that’s what runs up these elapsed times. But if we look here it’s only one but they had 37 denials. So this is an example of where we again need to go down to the daily level but we want to look and see and normalize those denials. I personally like 15 minutes, so regardless of how many denials a user gets in a 15-minute period of time you normalize it to one. You can set, if you’re using our tool, you can set that threshold. But regardless you want to be able to drill down into that and see what’s going on.

[13:48] So the other thing that I think is interesting and important, especially in this situation, and it’s going to change, right, if you’ve been to any of my other webinars, how we approach the data not only changes by what vendor we’re looking at, it not only changes by what type of entitlements we have, but it changes by when our first glance. That’s why I always recommend from the best practices we start at the top, the global level, because you might want to look at different data points. And you may or may not have time. One of the things that’s interesting is a lot of customers, they want to consolidate the renewal dates to make it easier, right, so they can remember tracking, etc. But I’ll tell you, when you put all your renewals on a specific month, or even if you say okay we’re going to have them twice a year, that is an enormous amount of work and it makes it tough. So again it has to do with your business culture and your workflow in your organization.

[14:46] But what I’m looking at here is what is the change in usage month over month, right. So I’m going to go back a year, so now we’re looking at 23 and 24. And here it’s just what does that look like percentage. So sometimes it went down, I mean May, that’s weird, why did it go all the way down to two and then jump back up. But what we can see is once we get into 24 this is continuously ticking up month over month. So if we looked at our average max in use for the month of 23 it was only seven, but if we look at our average in 24 that went up so it’s a big increase. And so I want to look at another data point, right. So what do I have, more users, did I have a new project come online, did I do an acquisition, what does that look like? And so here you can see, okay our distinct user count is ticking up. I mean it’s not consistent, right, it’s not, but it’s never going to be typically. But we can see hey that’s ticking up, so now I need to take that into consideration. So I’ve already identified based on my 2024 usage I have more licenses than I need, but I have a trend of this going up.

[16:12] So again, hopefully in your organization you know, or you can inquire, what’s causing that. Did we do an acquisition? Okay we did an acquisition, so that’s going to, you know, not continue, in other words the tick up is not going to continue. Did we just, our sales are going up, we have increases in projects, etc. What’s the expected forecast? So do I need to continue, do I calculate that we’re going to continue to do that? Because if, especially if you have perpetual, if I’ve already purchased the license, will I be using them during the 2025 year, right. Maybe even 26, it depends on the license and how many. I may not want to let them go yet, I may want to keep them to accommodate my expected growth based on my historical expected growth for 25. The inverse could be true, you could have done a divestment, right, so now instead of it going up it’s going down. So the reverse could be true. But hopefully what I’m trying to show here is the importance of looking at a lot of different data points. And I know a lot of folks don’t have time, so again that’s why we want to look from a global perspective and figure out where we need to drill in, if there’s specific applications inside that portfolio where we need to dig into the information to try to do as best we can with the time frame we have.

[17:44] So I had mentioned, right, that we knew we didn’t run out of licenses, so now we need to go find out what was happening. So now we’re looking at the individual server, pardon me, the individual server where that happened. And so one of those four reserved licenses was happening on this particular server that was throwing the denial. So in itself there’s only 10 licenses on this one server. You know if we saw five or all four even, right, that would tie up 40% of it. So we want to validate that. But let’s look at that usage trend. So we can see here that we’re maxing out a lot, right, we’re also never going down to zero during the weekends, etc., but we’re maxing out a lot. And so we need to take that into consideration when we’re looking at that data.

[18:55] So this will again say, hey we need to negotiate with the vendor to move some of these licenses. There may or may not be a cost, it may not be allowed in your contract terms. So this is another thing to keep in mind when you go into your vendor negotiation, these are things that you may or may not think of. You want the ability to reallocate licenses across different servers, and again you may or may not have that capability in your current contract, but you want to negotiate that into your renewal.

[19:36] So if you have any standalone licenses you want to look at different data points. The quick and easy one to look at is days since last used. So do I have users that have a local standalone license that aren’t using it, right. So these had very little usage but they also haven’t used it in quite some time. So again you can verify, did their project, did they go away, did they move to another department, are they no longer with the company, did that project end, whatever. So you can’t just take it as gospel, right, you have to look into it. But again we can quickly identify what those are.

[20:16] So let’s look at another example here, and this one’s a little bit different. Here we’re looking at where they’ve got the different levels. So we’re going to look at, we’re going to focus on the premium one, but we can look at what do I own versus what I used and we can see there’s a big delta. We can also see that we have one with zero usage, so we want to take that into account. Does it have a cost to it, it may or may not. But let’s drill into the premium one that we have here. So if we look at this utilization trend, wow, we’re way off, we only ever use six out of these 17 licenses. So we have an even bigger gap going on here. But we can see that sixth license was only, now this is a much smaller data set, this is only a six-week data set, because this was a new customer, they didn’t have a lot of data. But having just even a small amount of visibility, I want to say everybody, the main thing is start now. If you don’t have anything in your organization, start now metering your applications, because even a small amount of data will help you in your contract renewal and your negotiations in terms of getting you an effective license position. Most of the time we see customers with a reduction, not all the time, or maybe there’s one particular application in your portfolio where you’re short on licenses, so that one may go up, but then the rest of them go down, right. So typically the net is an overall savings.

[22:14] So we can look at that same thing, look at this monthly heat map. So we can see here we had some camping going on in August but in September that kind of stopped, right. So we can take that off the list in terms of doing that. Now this was again, it’s combining that data across the board so you’ll see those campers because we’re looking at the total six-week time frame. But we do have some denial spread in there and again we want to look at that. But what is the impact, what does it look like? So we’ve done the analysis right on both, but now what’s the impact to the organization, or where do I want to be licensed? So here we’re looking at all the different components in the portfolio, what their cost is, you know what I used, and we like to refer to it as zero impact, business as usual, meaning if I reduce my license count just to the max available, what’s the cost implication to the organization.

[23:15] So here we can see that business as usual it’s a $250,000 savings. But if I were to move to the 99 percentile, and you would have to evaluate that on each level, on each line item, then my savings goes up even further, right. But you’re going to say, but Linda, I’ve already paid for my perpetual cost, and I agree. This particular customer wanted to see their perpetual cost in here in this license model, but you can put your maintenance cost in here as well, right. So here we just have our maintenance going on. So now what is the cost impact? Well it’s still pretty significant, right. And this particular vendor was not a huge percentage of their portfolio, but for the total contract it was a good savings to be able to reduce that. And then you have to say, how long have I been paying for that maintenance with a chance that I may or may not use it, but I haven’t used it, I haven’t used it in a year, I haven’t used it in two years. So that number compounds very quickly over the years. And I see this over and over and over again, is that people are kind of afraid to reduce their license count because, like we talked about, what if I need it in the future, then I have to repurchase it, etc. But that’s why you want to look at what those trends are going in your organization. Do you have, what are your plans, what are the corporate goals, are we growing organically, are we growing by acquisition, you know what are all those things. But you can see that that compounds very quickly and even if you had term licenses you can quickly determine what those cost savings are.

[25:03] But this also shows you that you can see what the implication is, what if I moved from concurrent to term, what’s that look like. And there’s a lot more that goes into that, we’ll have to talk about that another day about how you simulate how many licenses you need, what data points you need to convert your shared concurrent licenses into named user, because that’s happening all over the market across multiple vendors.

[25:26] So let me just wrap up today with our optimization strategies. I’m always going to say this first and foremost, identify your zero usage, right. So that’s, we want to carve that out, we want to see if there’s a cost associated with it, and if so get rid of it. Some organizations we have a keep one strategy, and what that means is okay we haven’t used this, we haven’t used it in two years, but we did have a project, so we’re going to keep one just in case, you know, just worst case scenario, but then we’re going to reduce the rest of it. So you won’t necessarily take it to zero, you’ll take it to a keep one. You want to identify those campers and the long checkouts, right, where they’re camped on a license. You want to identify license hogs, that’s where you have multiple licenses, they have two, three, four, five, it depends on what their responsibilities are and if it makes sense in your organization. You want to normalize the denial so you can truly understand what’s going on, identify trends, and then once we get that done just know that you can keep going, right. Then we can look and say, hey, while those licenses were checked out were they actively using them, and if not can we harvest that. So that’s, you know, just again strategies on the network. On the standalone side we need to look at different data points. When did I last use it, how many user days over that time frame did the user use it? Because if, let’s say we’re looking at a year’s worth of data and they only had 10 user days throughout the year, do they need a standalone license? Maybe we can harvest that, give it to a power user, right, somebody who’s using a lot, using the product every day, because you’ve already paid for it so let’s use it. And they can go on the concurrent model. You want to look at elapsed time and then again we can look at that active and inactive. So I’ve covered a lot of material today but we have only a couple of minutes for questions, we probably have time for one question before we wrap up. Any questions?

[27:45] Nix: So thank you Linda for your insightful presentation. We do have one question here. Can Open iT provide audit trails for SolidWorks license usage to assist with vendor audits?

[27:53] Linda: And the answer is absolutely. So where folks get into trouble, and where we can help from an auditing perspective, is one of course showing incredible detailed information about the actual usage all the way down to the user level, location, where they physically located. And that’s where in an audit you may get dinged, if you will. So you might have a user that is supposed to be using a regional server and they’re on a different server, other than where they’re supposed to be, and it’s against your entitlements. So being able to look at the host, being able to look at how many hosts they’re running, being able to look at those locations, those are all things that are very critical in a compliance audit. And so yes, we’re absolutely able to help with that. I’m going to say call us, well call us.

[28:59] Nix: I think we’re out of time. I’m happy to answer more questions, just shoot them to us in an email. You can send your questions at webinars@openit.com. You can follow our socials, Open iT, Inc., and before this year ends, connect with one of our Solutions Consultants, optimize your software licenses now for guaranteed growth in 2025. Once again this is Nix, your host for today. Thank you and stay safe. Thank you everybody.