Managing ANSYS licenses isn’t just about choosing between perpetual and subscription models. It’s about gaining clarity in a landscape filled with evolving entitlements, feature packages or bundles, true-ups, and usage models that rarely match how your teams actually work. Whether you’re dealing with named-user, shared, or cloud-based access, the real challenge is optimizing usage without compromising performance.
Licensing Challenges That Hinder Engineering Productivity
Organizations using ANSYS licenses often face:
- Unused or underused features within expensive packages or feature sets
- License shortages during critical hours creating denials
- Increasing demand for cloud-based or elastic licensing without clear usage patterns
- Lack of visibility into how features are consumed across teams and locations
Procurement teams are expected to manage costs. Engineering managers want uninterrupted access. But few have the detailed usage data they need to align these priorities. That’s where the disconnect begins.
Why Built-In Tools Aren’t Enough
ANSYS offers management utilities like the native ANSYS License Manager and Elastic Licensing Portal. These tools provide snapshots of real-time usage, denials, and consumption of elastic units. But these fall short when it comes to:
- Long-term usage trends
- Feature-level consumption
- User- or group-specific analysis
- Scenario modeling for entitlement changes
Engineering license environments are too dynamic for static reports. Without granular insight, organizations risk making costly decisions based on assumptions.
These limitations hinder organizations from proactively managing software costs, reallocating underused licenses, or planning for future needs effectively. Open iT offers advanced license monitoring, optimization, and forecasting tools that go far beyond what ANSYS’ built-in utilities provide.
A Purpose-Built Analyzer for ANSYS License Usage
Open iT’s Analyzer for ANSYS Software offers a comprehensive solution to monitor, analyze, and optimize license usage across the enterprise. This is Open iT’s flagship product, LicenseAnalyzer, tailored specifically for ANSYS licenses. It provides real-time insights and detailed reports, enabling managers to make informed decisions about license allocation and utilization.
Key Benefits
Enterprise-wide ANSYS Usage Data Collection: Gain visibility into license usage across all departments and locations, ensuring that resources are allocated where they’re needed most.
Customizable Reports and Dashboards: Tailor reports to meet specific organizational needs, facilitating better understanding and communication of license usage patterns.
Support for IT Chargeback or Cost Allocation: Implement fair and transparent billing practices by accurately tracking license usage per department or project.
Feature-to-Feature Set Mapping: A Game-Changer for ANSYS License Management
In complex ANSYS environments, it’s rarely a one-to-one match between a checked-out license and a single application. A shared license can support multiple modules or solvers, making it difficult to understand what’s truly being used—and by whom.
This is where Open iT’s feature-to-feature set mapping changes the game.
Instead of just reporting license checkouts, Open iT maps features back to their corresponding application sets, calculating the most cost-efficient bundle that would have covered the usage. This allows organizations to:
- Attribute costs more accurately to departments or projects
- Identify redundant or underutilized modules within expensive feature sets
- Rationalize complex ANSYS entitlements for better cost alignment
- Reduce compliance risks with transparent, auditable usage reports
By consolidating and standardizing feature usage data, Open iT helps bridge the gap between procurement and engineering teams. Decisions are no longer based on guesswork or vendor estimates—they’re driven by real-world data.
Model What-If Scenarios Before You Commit
Thinking of switching from shared pools to named user licenses? Curious whether an enterprise cloud option would reduce bottlenecks? Open iT helps simulate the impact of these changes using real usage data.
For example:
- See how many users consistently use specific solvers
- Identify idle license time across departments
- Estimate potential savings or overages in new entitlement models
Armed with these insights, procurement and engineering leaders can negotiate smarter and avoid waste.
Let Data Drive Your ANSYS Licensing Strategy
Licenses are expensive. But unnecessary restrictions on your engineers can be even more costly. The key is balance—and that means making decisions backed by usage intelligence, not assumptions or vendor-supplied summaries.
Open iT gives you the tools to:
- Right-size your ANSYS entitlements
- Ensure engineers have access when it matters most
- Reduce waste from idle or oversized bundles
- Support migrations between licensing models with confidence
Ready for a Smarter Approach to ANSYS Licensing?
If you suspect there’s room to improve your ANSYS license usage—there is. Whether it’s gaining deeper visibility, simulating the impact of a new model, or planning your next renewal, Open iT is here to help.
Book a usage assessment and find out what your licenses are really doing.
Because when simulation software is this powerful, your license management should be, too. Stop guessing, start optimizing. Experience how Open iT transforms ANSYS license management—book a demo now.
