Closed & Restricted Networks
Metering that never calls home.
Open iT installs as a self-contained deployment inside a closed area. Collection, reporting and analysis all run within the boundary, so nothing has to cross it for the system to work.
- Level 1, Level 2, CLIMS and reporting, all inside the enclave
- Data leaves anonymized, on your terms, or not at all
- Connected subnets roll up. Closed areas stay closed.
Your closed areas hold the most expensive engineering software you own and the least data about it.
A tool that meters inside the enclave and analyzes in a cloud service isn’t an air-gapped tool. That surfaces three weeks in, after the architecture review, and it ends the evaluation. So the open side of the estate gets optimized every renewal while the closed side runs on a seat count nobody has tested against usage.
Across engineering estates, 20 to 40 percent of licenses are idle at any given moment. In a closed area that number isn’t a measurement. It’s an assumption, and it has been renewed on for years.
What Open iT Does
1
Run the whole stack inside the boundary.
Four things install in the area and talk only to each other: Level 1 against the license managers, Level 2 on the workstations for True Active Usage, CLIMS as the one console for every server in there, and the reporting and analysis servers behind them. Nothing calls out. Nothing has to cross the boundary for any of it to work.
2
Move data on your terms, or not at all.
Three patterns cover most sites. Fully self-contained, where the area reports from inside itself and nothing leaves. Periodic export, where an anonymized data set goes out for consolidated reporting on the open side. Or a connected roll-up, where a path already exists between an enterprise network and a program subnetwork and collected data is forwarded to a central server. Which one you get is a security-governance decision your team makes during implementation planning, not a product setting.
3
Meter a frozen baseline without unfreezing it.
Metering follows the license manager rather than an application build, so FlexNet, DSLS, LM-X, RLM, Sentinel and CodeMeter estates are covered whatever release sits behind them. Version data is captured in the record, so three programs on three validated baselines of the same tool read as three demand curves. Earlier Open iT releases keep receiving maintenance too: hotfix streams are maintained for 9.17, 9.19 and 10.1 across Core Server, client and CLIMS.
4
Train your people, because we're not allowed to see your data.
In a classified environment we can’t look at your data, which rules out the model where the vendor runs the analysis and hands over a report. So your team is trained to data analysis specialist level, on your system, with your data. They build and interpret the reports, tune parameters, investigate a denial pattern and produce the evidence a renewal needs, without anyone outside the organization seeing a record.
Have questions? Talk to a licensing specialist.
Closed-Area Deployment Checklist
What your security team needs to decide before an implementation plan can be written. Record what is settled, flag what is not, and bring the result to the scoping conversation. Your answers stay in this browser tab until you choose to send them.
decisions made
Your decision record
Decided items are the inputs to an implementation plan. Open items are the agenda for the scoping conversation. Bring us the constraint, not the requirement.
How this is calculated
Every line is arithmetic on your inputs and two published customer outcomes. Nothing here is modelled, weighted, or inferred.
- Annual spend = seats × cost per seat.
- Idle capacity = seats × idle share. The 20 to 40 percent default range is what Open iT measures across engineering estates.
- Published benchmark = annual spend × 20% and × 20.8%. Devon Energy cut its subsurface software budget 20% across 11 vendors and modules (openit.com, 2022). A published, anonymised energy supermajor reduced subsurface modeling from $12M to $9.5M, which is 20.8%. Both are reported as harvesting and optimisation outcomes.
- Concurrency ceiling = seats × (1 minus idle share). Real peak concurrency is higher than average demand and can only come from metering.
Idle capacity is the ceiling: every idle hour recovered, which no estate achieves. The benchmark is the floor two real deployments landed on, within a point of each other. Your outcome sits between them, and the only way to narrow it is to measure.
What this cannot tell you
- Your actual idle share. Until Level 2 measures host activity, the slider is an assumption, and it is the input the whole result swings on.
- Your real peak concurrency. Twelve months of metering gives you the peak against entitlement per module.
- Which seats are recoverable. Automatic reclamation runs on FlexLM, LM-X, LUM and RLM. Petrel on FlexNet qualifies; anything else in your estate needs checking first.
- Whether suspend suits your operations. Reopening Petrel costs an engineer 5 to 15 minutes, which is why suspend beats terminate, but thresholds still need setting with your leads.
Figures in USD. Two published customer outcomes are used as the benchmark band. They are that customer’s results, reported as harvesting and optimisation outcomes, and are not a projection for your estate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Open iT need internet access to work?
No. Every component runs inside the deployment, analysis included. A closed area gets metering, denial reporting and active-versus-inactive analysis on the same terms as your open network, with no connection to anything outside it.
Can we consolidate closed and open reporting?
Only if your security governance allows it. Where a path already exists, collected data is forwarded to a central server. Where it doesn’t, the area reports from inside itself, and anything that does leave is a periodic anonymized export your security team specified.
Can you support us with cleared personnel?
Bring the requirement to the scoping conversation. Where a program needs support staff of a particular nationality or holding a particular clearance, that gets agreed as part of the engagement rather than discovered afterwards.
Do we have to upgrade to stay supported?
No. Earlier releases keep receiving maintenance, with hotfix streams for 9.17, 9.19 and 10.1 across Core Server, client and CLIMS. Accredited environments can’t upgrade on a vendor’s schedule and shouldn’t be asked to.
Bring us the constraint, not the requirement. Which areas are closed, which baselines are frozen, what your personnel rules are, and which applications matter. Then start with a Level 1 usage assessment across one renewal cycle. In a closed area it runs entirely inside the boundary.