Partie 3 - Plongée dans votre portefeuille Autodesk® pour maximiser le retour sur investissement des logiciels

[0:01] Mae: Good morning and good evening everyone we have come to the third and final session of our live webinar series. Deep dive into your Autodesk portfolio to maximize ROI on software investment. My name is Mae and I am your host for today. Before we get started let me encourage everyone to ask questions. Just drop your questions in the comment section and Linda will address them in the Q&A session of her presentation. If we don’t have the opportunity to answer all of your questions or if there are any questions that need further investigation, rest assured that we will send them to Linda and we will reach out via email or through LinkedIn to answer those inquiries.

[0:44] Our presenter 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 the technology industry. She is a proven leader with a unique blend of responsibilities in small and large companies with a passion for building successful businesses. Currently she is helping clients solve their business issues around software licensing. Ladies and gentlemen, we have Linda Cole.

[1:17] Linda: Thank you for that introduction, Mae. I really appreciate it. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. So welcome to, as Mae said, our third and final session on the Autodesk licensing. And today we’re going to just start with a quick recap and then do as we said a deep dive. We call it a level approach to optimization of your licenses. So we’ll go through what we refer to as level one, two, and three and I’ll end up with a quick success story to maybe help you build some confidence that you can get started today.

[1:49] So if you remember, if you were there in our first session, we talked about all of the different licensing types that Autodesk currently has and the combinations thereof. So different folks have different types of licenses and combinations. So when we talk today I’ll kind of separate how you look at those and what the impacts of those are because it’s different depending upon if you have Token Flex or concurrent or Named User Subscription etc. So you know as I mentioned a lot of you have a combination of licenses. So let’s just jump into level one. When we talk about level one it’s that first layer of where your license is. If you’re on concurrent it’s where your licenses are checked in and checked out. If you’re on a subscription it’s where you’re opening and closing an application. So we’ve shown some examples of looking at just total usage but we don’t, that’s not the only thing we can look at. We also can look at usage during and after business hours and we also have the ability to utilize alerts to drive behavior.

[3:00] So what does that typically look like. Here’s an example where a customer, this is just two examples on Revit and AutoCAD and we’ve broken this down by Monday through Friday business hours versus after hours and then weekends. So you can see here that on Revit more than 50 percent of the usage is during business hours but it’s not, it’s still a large percentage after that and on AutoCAD more than 50 is after hours. Now it depends on what we’re looking at, this is about this is 90 days worth of data about 50 users. If we were looking at 2020 this would make sense because when we you know first went into the shutdown people’s work habits changed right, people are working from home they’re trying to get their kids online, you know they’re working at all different hours. But if this is pre-pandemic or today depending upon what your organization is looking like, you know I haven’t seen anybody go back to a full pre-pandemic normal where it’s just an eight to five or you know eight to six type of day. We still most customers that I talk to have some type of hybrid so you still have some folks working from home part of the time. But this will help you understand again do we have people that are camped on a license or do we have people working it off hours, because all of that affects your license optimization. As I mentioned we want to drive that behavior.

[4:27] And how can we do that. So with the Open iT solution we’re using alerts and hopefully the solution you’re using has that ability, if not we’d love to talk to you. But you want to be able to alert your end users if they have, this is an extended checkout, we call it license camping. The criteria we set on this one the threshold was 48 hours but what we found is that it absolutely changes their behavior. You know you let them know that hey you’ve had this checked out and most end users will cooperate and say yep yep I’ve had it checked out I’m not using it so I’ll go ahead and check that license back in or I’ll close down the application. Again it depends on the licensing. Now some people say why does that matter, you know if I have paid for a yearly subscription what does it matter, I don’t care if they leave it open. But I’m going to show you some examples of why you should care and why it makes a difference.

[5:19] So as we dive deeper and we go into level two this is where we’re going to look at the active versus inactive ratio. So if you were on concurrent or Token Flex, the check in and check out, the example is you checked the license out at 8 and checked it back in at 5. Looks like you’re using it, good corporate user, but were you actually using that license right. And again on subscription or flex it’s the opening and closing of that application. So we’re going to meter and look at what that ratio looks like. And so then when we have folks that have you know less than the average ratio we can help inform them and show them to help drive that behavior.

[6:01] So here we’re looking at the gray are the active hours and the red are the inactive hours so you can see our utilization percentages are not very good here and in December they go down even further. That’s probably because of, you know, we see this typically in December and it’s just because there’s a lot more activities in offices, you know office parties, lunches, time out etc, people taking off, taking lunch etc. So we really want, you’re never going to be able to get a hundred percent utilization, or it’s it’s unrealistic, but we should be able to look and try to strive to achieve somewhere in the 90s. And it depends on your environment and your workforce and what projects they’re working on and that type of thing but I think we could all agree that we could do a better job of utilizing our licenses when we look at this active inactive ratio.

[7:00] So let’s look at what that looks like in Named User. So as I showed you I think in session two we can take the elapsed time but you can’t just divide it by 24. We actually do cut the data by a date time stamp but we actually can report on user days. The reason you want to do this as a reminder is this is how you’re going to determine what the best licensing type is, whether these users should have a Named User Subscription or as we below the break-even point, these users, it would be more cost-effective for them to use the new Autodesk Flex. You can also based upon their usage calculate how many tokens you need. So when we’re looking here we have 15, when we’re just looking at that level one data right, that runtime usage, 15 we think should use Named User Subscription and the rest should use Flex, which is different than Token Flex. But now let’s layer on that level two data. This is the active user days and we can see now really it’s only eight users that would qualify or that would be optimized with the Named User Subscription and the rest of them would go into the Autodesk Flex token. So if we calculate the difference of this it’s a savings of 24 000 on this particular example but that’s 42 percent. So hopefully you can see that taking it to that next level just gets you additional savings. So people normally start with level one then we deep dive into level two.

[8:46] So now let’s look at level three. How can we automate this process, how can we you know make it even easier on both the license administrators as well as the end users. Well with a managed usage level three you have the ability to set policies and thresholds to automatically harvest those inactive licenses and then it’s fully automated. So you don’t have to look at it again. Most people say well if I have a subscription does it matter. And as I just showed you in that example it does, because if we actually have the true usage, users who you’re currently paying for a full subscription may really only need Flex in terms of an optimized position and the most cost effective method. So you want to, this is a little bit different than emailing alerts, these are actually pop-ups that come up on the end user. And again you set policies and thresholds for what those thresholds are and what the policies are. You can have you know power users where they never get this, there’s all types of ways that you can configure this.

[9:57] But let’s look at what the effect of that is. So in this particular customer data set we implemented level three starting in March. So you can see this active inactive ratio starts to close the gap, starts to close, and our efficiency percentage goes up after we deploy a level three. So now we’re up in the 90s and for June we’re all the way up in the 96 which is a great optimization level. Again it varies depending upon your specific business and the culture etc, but you can see that this enables you to automate that process. Again on Token Flex it’s going to help reduce the number of tokens, especially you don’t want them to you know flow over the midnight where they’re actually having to pay for an additional set of tokens. In the subscription this is helping you because you get to that true active usage without relying on them to do it, and so then again they may be below that threshold and it may be more applicable to have a Flex type of licensing instead of a Named User Subscription. And even on Flex those tokens are for 24 hours. So in that scenario you don’t want to just leave an application open over that 24-hour time block, so then again you’re going to have to pay for it again. Now if you’re actively using the product no problem. We’re really just trying to look at all the different ways we can take that license position and optimize it. We never want people to have to look and wait for a license, we want to have the right license for the right person at the right time. But hopefully you can see by this level approach that you can continue to optimize your license position.

[11:52] The other thing that happens, that all of these different types of metering and reporting enable you to do, is a lot of times folks change their jobs especially in project base. So what we see a lot at customers that are not actively metering their license usage is they don’t really have any visibility of what’s going on. So maybe they have a block of end users who, you know, they come on board, they might be a new hire or they come on to a new project and they’re all assigned licenses. But as that project winds down their usage starts to change right. And so do you get notified as a license administrator or as the vendor management person in your organization, do you get notified at all that a project is winding down or that the usage is going down. You need some type of metering and some type of visibility to drive that. And then what is the effect from a cost perspective, you know the harvesting. This is a Token Flex example specifically, you can see that the actual cost will go down as we optimize the license. Again we don’t want to not have a license, we just want to use them as efficiently as possible.

[13:22] So as I’ve mentioned in all three sessions the key to an optimized license position and the key to savings both in a reduction of your current spend as well as a cost avoidance for future spend is looking at metering now. You need to start now. Now I’ve had some questions about when does it matter, you know I don’t have time, my renewal’s coming up. So let me just go through a quick recent customer success story. So we had a prospect approach us and said you know I don’t have any visibility of my Autodesk licenses, I have a renewal coming up and it’s in less than 60 days, what can I do. So we started metering immediately right. They had already converted all of their concurrent licenses to subscriptions so they already had all of their subscriptions. They had their data from their Autodesk portal but they still didn’t have visibility of what was going on. They could see how many licenses they owned, they could see how many were assigned, there’s a couple of little dials that you can get in terms of when people have used what particular applications but it doesn’t tell you who, you can’t really get that information.

[14:47] So we were able to help them by deploying LicenseAnalyzer™ 2022 level one where we’re metering what that usage is at the user level. So we were able to produce that information and before they had to make their decision we had about 30, we had specifically 33 days of data and we were able to look at things like distinct user days, how we talked about to determine whether subscription or Flex makes more sense. But we also layered on as we talked about in the second session day since last use. So this particular engineering firm had a lot of project-based business, so they had users who had been assigned licenses but maybe their project ended but they hadn’t used the product in a long time so they don’t necessarily need a license today.

[15:35] We were also able to look and do the analysis as I mentioned and we talked about in session two as well to look at the collection. So typically for using two or more features it’s cheaper and makes more sense for you to purchase a collection. Now if you just look at hey these users have two or more so we’re going to give them a subscription, we were able to actually dive into that even deeper to say well yes they used to but on this second application they only used it a fraction of the time. So it really makes more sense to give them a Named User Subscription on application one and then use Autodesk Flex on application two. So we were able to help them with this vendor analysis and they were able to go into their negotiation. Arms now they had some historic licenses that were a different price point they wanted to maintain. They also were doing, we simulated a year’s worth of data but we think you need a true year’s worth of data right to make those final decisions. But they were able to see, have a more well-rounded view. They only took a percentage of the recommendations and even with just taking a percentage of those reductions and optimization positions they still had a 3x return on their investment of Open iT. And they said clearly this is fantastic, we can’t wait till you know next year when we can reduce that even further. So again to give you hope, hopefully give you some confidence that you can start today with anything and get a better understanding of what’s going on with your Autodesk licenses regardless of whether we’re looking at level one, level two, or level three.

[17:20] So I just want to remind everybody that we would love to, I’ve mentioned this many many times, every customer is different, you have your own culture and nuances and locations and license agreements etc. So if you want to talk to us you can go to the openit.com website click on contact us and you can schedule a meeting with me or one of my other colleagues, business consultants, and we’d be happy to talk about your specific situation to see if we can help you at all. So I really really appreciate everybody’s attendance and I think I’m going to throw it over to questions at this point, Mae.

[18:07] Mae: Thank you so much, Linda, for your insightful presentation. So we have, we can already start the question and answer portion now. So great. I have here one question from Greg. “Why is my current license provider not providing this service?”

[18:22] Linda: Thank you for the question, Greg. By current license provider do you mean Autodesk and maybe you could even just type in here if that’s what you’re referring to really quickly. Is that who you’re referring to, is why is Autodesk not providing this. I would say, I’m going to answer it two ways. So if you’re referring to Autodesk, Autodesk does provide in your Autodesk portal they provide some basic, super super basic reporting. But if you don’t have premium which is 300 per user per year in the US, you only get the information of what you own and what’s assigned, you have a list of users and what assignments there are for each user and you can get a distinct user count. You can’t really change the dates but you can get this month, last three months. Oh, you have a third party, okay I’ll answer that too. But so there’s very limited data. When you go to the premium subscription you do get a little more information but not to this level of detail. If you have a third party service provider I can’t really answer what other metering solutions are doing other than maybe they’re just providing you with a tool with some basic metering, whereas we’re providing a total solution and we have business analysts and consultants on staff to assist our customers across the board, not just with Autodesk, with all of their licensing needs. So hopefully that answered your question, if not just pop some more detail in your question.

[20:08] Mae: All right, thank you Linda. And we also received several questions before our session started and they were sent via optimizeautodesk@openit.com. So yes, one question Linda is that what amount of data do you recommend to forecast needs for contract renewal.

[20:26] Linda: Well as I mentioned before, again this is true for any vendor but with Autodesk it’s going to depend on the type of licensing you have. Now the more data you have the better decision, or more, maybe not, maybe more informed decision making you can have. But if you’re looking at Autodesk Flex or you’re looking at Named User Subscriptions those contract terms are annual. Now you can do a three-year subscription and get a discount. So if you’re looking at annual subscriptions I would say it’s 12 months. If you’re looking at a three-year commit then I would look at a longer trend. You know I say the easiest way to think about that is to marry up the terms of whatever contract you’re looking at. Token Flex is absolutely three years and you want to look at that data from a lot of different data points. Again the more data points you look at the more well-rounded the view is and the better informed decision making you can make.

[21:31] Mae: Good question. And all right and we have one more question. “Can you use this data for department chargeback?”

[21:38] Linda: Absolutely. So when you have, regardless of solution you have, you can take that data. What’s going to vary is depending upon the solution you have, that’s going to tell you how granular you can get on your chargeback. With the Open iT solution what we do is we have the ability, we integrate with your active directory, we integrate with the Autodesk portal. So we have the ability to do chargeback all the way down to, you know, you can do it by cost center, by department, you can do it by region, we can do it by project. There’s a lot of different ways that you can cut the data to do chargeback. So we can absolutely do that. We’ve actually had some customers that charge one rate for active usage and a different rate, a higher rate for inactive usage, to help drive behavior, you know a carrot stick type of thing. So but the answer is generically yes, we can absolutely do chargeback and marry it up however you want.

[22:40] Mae: Thank you, Linda. And I think we have time for just one more question. “Can you help us even if we don’t have usage data?”

[22:57] Linda: Wow that’s a great question and the answer is yes we can. As I mentioned we have business analysts, business consultants, we have a whole team of people and subject matter experts around not only Autodesk but other vendors as well. So if you came to us, I mean our first conversation is going to be you know kind of a discovery call to talk about what type of licenses, what type of licensing you have in your environment. And if you have any data at all, let’s say you say I have no solution, I have nothing. Well I’m going to say you still have information and we know how to get that. So even if you have nothing but the Autodesk portal we can help you analyze that data and get you some, again every data point we get gives us better info, makes, helps us make a better informed decision. So depending upon what you have, whether it’s another tool or whether it’s no tool, we can absolutely help you and add value and get help you with some insights into what’s going on with your licenses and make some suggestions absolutely.

[24:08] Mae: Thank you. That’s it. I’m sorry if you have, yeah you’re probably going to say this but if you have any other questions just submit them here or Mae is going to give you another option but I appreciate all the questions, great questions today.

[24:16] Thank you so much, Linda. It’s been a great session. And thank you also to our attendees for joining our webinar today. A quick reminder that this webinar is recorded and can be immediately replayed after this live stream. But we will also upload it on our website together with her presentation earlier. So we appreciate your attendance to this series of webinars and we would like to grab this opportunity to invite you all on our next webinar which will be a live customer interview on May 11th with Burns and McDonnell’s director of engineering technology Michael Allen. It will also be live streamed on LinkedIn so don’t forget to register today. Also we will be launching our podcast on May 10th and our first episode is about application rationalization, so do stay tuned. Please visit our website to view our upcoming events at openit.com or connect with one of our solutions consultants. We are glad to assist you on your software optimization journey. So always be updated, follow us on social media. Once again this is Mae your host for today. Thank you and stay safe!

[25:28] Linda: Thank you everybody, reach out, I’d love to talk to you about your specific situation.