シーメンスの簡素化：複雑なハイブリッド環境におけるライセンスの最適化

[0:00] Nix: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you’re tuning in from. Welcome. Today’s webinar is all about simplifying what’s often seen as one of the more complex areas in software asset management, Siemens licensing. This is Siemens simplified, optimized licenses in complex hybrid environments. I’m Nix, your host for today’s session. Over the next 20 minutes, we’re going to explore how Open iT helps organizations bring clarity and control to hybrid Siemens license models. Whether you’re dealing with tokens, subscriptions, or concurrent licenses, feel free to send your questions through the Q&A panel. We’ll answer as many as we can during the session and follow up if we run out of time.

[0:43] Today’s speaker brings 25 years of oil and gas leadership experience from ConocoPhillips and BP, combining deep industry knowledge with expertise in digital products and strategic asset management. Let’s welcome David to the virtual stage.

[0:59] David: Thank you Nix. Hello everybody. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon wherever you’re calling in from. Really pleased to be doing this webinar today. Siemens simplified, complex hybrid environments. As Nix pointed out, this is like a triple whammy of complexity, complexity of application suite and IT functionality, complexity of licensing mechanisms, and complexity of heritage and history and how the product has evolved over time. So looking forward to getting stuck in. As Nix said, I’ve been around a long time. I never thought I’d end up being a product manager or a portfolio manager, but that’s how I’ve ended up, and long experience in helping clients with how to get the best out of complicated application portfolios, defining the right licensing and taking them forward.

[1:54] I’m going to go over just a little bit about the Siemens portfolio, a little bit about their history, what it is that they do, a little bit about the licensing, the technology behind the licensing and the different types of licensing that are used to fulfill the application needs, and why is that a challenge? What makes that difficult and makes it something difficult to get transparency into unless you have a really good tool like Open iT LicenseAnalyzer™. So I’ll go through what that does, how it hangs together, and then just dive into a little bit of nitty-gritty about how you would go about optimization of some specific modules to get the best out of it, as a summary of what you need to do across your portfolio to get the best results.

[2:42] So who is Open iT? What do they do? Very much focused on engineering and technical software optimization. And by engineering I mean software that is used for a specific industry task. Is it used by your scientists, your engineers, your experts? Typically complex, specific to your business, and can be quite expensive in terms of what you pay for it, but also in terms of supporting it. But in addition, Open iT has the flexibility to look at all across an application portfolio, including enterprise applications, to give you a full view, out-of-the-box analysis for a majority of industry tools. But then, of course, if you have bespoke applications or in-house developed applications, Open iT can also work with you to be able to monitor those along with industry or commercial offerings. And there’s just a selection of logos here of the types of application and industry that Open iT looks after and can analyze.

[3:49] And we always talk about true active use, not what you’re entitled to, not what you’ve bought, not what you have installed, but what you’re actually using. Get into that important detail to allow you to make good decisions. Could also automate license harvesting over time. So if you have applications, you’re using them, users are checking them out but not actively using them, that’s also something Open iT can track and take action on. Can also simulate license agreements. If this is what you have right now, this is what you’re paying for, this is what you’re using, you can simulate that. If you want to make changes, great for contract negotiation, to simulate what could happen if you entered into a different type of agreement.

[4:32] You can also look at that data across a wide range of reporting tools. Open iT has its own web-based reporting function which is highly configurable, but you can put any industry analysis tool, Power BI particularly, also Tableau, Spotfire, that kind of thing. You can put it in an Excel spreadsheet if you would like, a lot of flexibility there.

[4:54] Why is this a challenge? Why do we need these tools? Because your applications can be licensed a number of different ways. Perpetual versus time-based. Perpetual meaning you’ve made an investment in an application, you’re then paying maintenance for it, it’s probably more conventionally licensed with concurrency. It might be time-based, i.e. you’re paying for the amount of time you’re using, that’s like a consumption system. Are you paying for it by device? Are you paying for it by named user? Are you getting it from a SaaS environment, the application, or do you have it on-premises? So all of these things add up to make your life more complex. Typically the kind of applications we’re talking about, Siemens is definitely in this category. It is a mix at a vendor level, an application level, and then an individual feature and product level beneath that for different functionality that will fit together and interact. And you may also be paying, if you’re paying by time, is that by hour, by quarter, by month, is it named user? A lot of complexity. So that’s the kind of challenge that you want to use Open iT to solve.

[6:02] So onto the Siemens portfolio and thinking about what the Siemens portfolio does. It runs software that builds the stuff that underpins our modern life. Whether you want to build a car, a real one or a model one, you need to use the types of software that Siemens can provide. Beginning with CAD, computer-aided design, actually drawing what you want to do. In times gone past you would have used blueprints, you would have had documents like this to design your products, but now it’s all done in a virtual environment. You need to simulate what those products are going to do, structural strength, acoustics, thermodynamics, really complex engineering aspects. You need to build those products, what machines you’re going to use, how the plans are going to be put into production. PLM, product lifecycle management, how does your product flow through your manufacturing system? How do you manage versioning? How do all the different disciplines of your organization work together? And this is something Siemens really specializes in, enabling a digital twin for testing of your product before it goes into full production. And it’s not just physical things, cars, planes, phones, but also EDA, so an electronic suite as well, designing ICs, printed circuit boards, to simulate the nano electronics as well as the macro engineering. And then lastly, putting it into production, a factory setting, quality control, traceability, all of that stuff that you need to get your product out the door. And the tools that are used for this, the Nix suite for CAD, Simcenter, Teamcenter for the PLM, Tecnomatix, Opcenter, and then Siemens EDA for the electronics part.

[8:06] So that’s a very complicated set of applications. And one of the reasons it’s so complicated is that there’s been a long history of acquisitions over time back to the 70s and 80s even. I’m certainly not going to go into this level of detail at all, because this has been going on a very long time and probably could take up a webinar considerably longer than this one. But certainly even recently, Altair and Dotmatics, large acquisitions that have further strengthened Siemens’ position but equally further made the environment a little bit more complex.

[8:49] So on to a few more of the details of how Siemens is licensed. The underlying technology that it uses is actually Flex, which is an industry standard across all verticals, very common. Oil and gas, automotive uses these technologies. It has a slight variation in the SALT, Siemens Advanced Licensing Technology, which is just an enhancement, but underlying it’s Flex, which is good because it makes it easy to read and accessible.

[9:27] There’s also a trend to move away from perpetual to subscription. Perpetual, as I said, is you make an investment, you pay a percentage, 20%, based on that initial investment, which gives you upgrades and support over time. Subscription is how we buy a lot of software now, not just in industry but for your phone, for games, for anything. You pay a subscription that is by month or by year rather than owning a piece of software and getting the updates. The days of a shrink-wrapped CD are very much over and Siemens is no different. It’s pushing its clients to that. That also comes with a price increase, which is an additional challenge, price increase and wanting to lock in for longer time periods perhaps of three years. Another challenge that customers have, which emphasizes the need for a really good method of monitoring what you have, as well as the FlexLM concurrent type licensing.

[10:34] There’s also token licensing, and I always think of token licensing as you have your bucket of tokens, you have a finite number in there, and you can spend them on any given user session on the tools that you want to use. And each tool that you want to use has a certain amount of tokens that you need to pay for, but you get them back at the end of the day. It’s like your shopping cart in the supermarket, you put your money in and then you get your money back. So it’s a finite number, different from a consumption-based model where you’re using the tokens but you’re burning them and you have a number that you then need to pay for.

[11:16] So that’s why it’s a complex hybrid environment. You’ve got the concurrent licensing which is the more standard or easy to think about, because you have a license server and then you’re checking out those licenses from anywhere in your environment. You’ve then got token-based where you’re using those tokens to spend on technology that is finite. You might have named user, where a particular user uses a particular application and that’s where their access ends, typically for a much smaller company where you know who those people are. The larger the company the more flexibility you will need. Consumption, as I say, is more the taxi meter, you need to use the technology through time but you’re just using up tokens, and that’s probably more for cloud use or SaaS-delivered applications. But again, all these four different types of licensing contribute to the difficulty and the complexity.

[12:22] Okay, so on to what Open iT does. LicenseAnalyzer™, which is the brand name for the tool that Open iT provides. At its basic level, when you acquire licenses or you buy licenses, you purchase and store them, and over time that may increase. And if you’re looking at your usage, you’ll see that if your usage hits a particular high at one point, you might think you need to make another investment, another installation, which you hope will fulfill your business need. But without really good knowledge or without really good analytics, that may not be the case, because you might have a high watermark of what you think you might have been using, but your true active usage could be a lot lower. It’s either because you have a lot of idle time, you have users that have moved on and are no longer using the application, or you are modeling your entitlements and what you’re buying based on a very short peak that you may be able to mitigate by understanding that and business planning. So you have that true active use which is a lot lower than what your entitlements may be. So really, you’ve got your licensed and purchased applications with usage, and then you have your true usage below that. And what Open iT looks to help you do is take your entitlements and what you own down to a level for what you are actually using, what your true active usage is. And that’s what we’re going to aim to do.

[14:00] So if you have Open iT running in your system, what does it look like? It’s got a web-based dashboard, very simple to use. I love this view. It’s the simplest possible view. You choose an application and then you choose a product beneath it and you can just look over time and see, there’s the application, there’s the licenses I have available, there’s my usage line which is showing, as you’d expect, when your licenses are checked out. It’s also giving you an idea of the volume of hours, that’s the little blue graph. And very quickly you can see, okay, volume of hours as well as checkouts. You want to articulate whether it’s peak usage, number of checkouts, but also get a reflection of the volume. So is it a lot of users in it for a very short amount of time at a particular time of day or night, or is it they’re using them for long periods and throughout their working day as a core tool. Very good to understand.

[14:55] You can also see denials. So if you’re having problems it’ll flag that, and there’s a specific report for that. Is that a technical problem? Is it licenses not being available? Is it the same user just continually trying to access, or is it a wider problem with multiple users on different times of the day trying to get that functionality? Important to understand what your business impact is if you’re getting denials and don’t have access to those applications. You can also see who, because we’re integrating with Active Directory, you know, well who are those people? What business unit do they sit in? What is their physical location or job title. Very valuable.

[15:37] That was the kind of historical use which you can also report on. There’s also real-time use, anytime you can go in and say well okay, who’s using that application right now? How long have they been logged in? Who are they? What machine are they checking out from? Is it the cloud environment? Is it on-premises? Really valuable, good to know and useful.

[16:00] So that’s the web portal. We also have the Power BI dashboard, and this is really cool and I think is particularly relevant when it comes to Siemens because of the hybrid nature of the licensing. Wanted to bring together possibly the same tool that is being licensed differently in the same view so you can make judgments and do analysis. And it’s also very interactive, you can click on particular tools, particular users, and then you’ll know, okay, that tool, what cohort of users is using it, for how long, what part of my business is doing that, and when. Really valuable if you want to do studies about what particular groups are doing at a time of divestment or a JIP, a joint industry project. It can be very valuable to get those analytics. Power BI is ideally suited sitting on top of Open iT data to give you some of that information.

[17:07] Okay, so on to just a little bit more detail of how you would go about bringing that line down, bringing your entitlements down to your true active usage. So we’ll look at a module here. We’ll run a report on NX MAC1, and on this view we’ve got 55 licenses available and the max in use at first glance is 41 with no denials. So there’s a bit of headroom there, 14 licenses that we can probably make a saving on or make an adjustment down.

[17:43] We can run a report and see how that’s changed over time, what time of day we were getting those different peaks. The blue line, it’s pretty standard as you expect, drop off at the weekend, rise during the week. So we look at a particular year to see that, and you might see like so we had that 41 in September but we didn’t see it in August. So that’s interesting, we’re only getting it in one month, probably needs a little bit more analysis. So one of the best ways to really analyze this and where you can take it down to is to do a license efficiency chart. And what this is articulating is the percentage of your total hours of usage by the number of licenses that are being used. So you already know that you’re not using more than 41. So that tells you that even though you have the capacity for 55, 100% of your need is fulfilled by 41 licenses. So you kind of know that, so you’ll be totally confident in taking it down to 41.

[19:04] However, if you were to say, okay, what’s 99%, what’s 99% of all my need, how many licenses would fulfill 99% of my total need? And this graph tells you that, and it’s actually 24 licenses. So what it’s saying is that you can fulfill 99% of your users’ need with 24 licenses. So that’s a lot less than 55, but it gives you the information you need to make a judgment about what the business impact is going to be to go from 55 to 24 or from 41 to 24.

[19:45] You can run a heat map as well. And one of the great things about a heat map, it’s just a contour map over time of that peak usage, is to see when those peaks are happening, what times of the day, and what the business is doing at those times, what the project cycle is like, is there a commitment by engineers to get certain pieces of work done by particular times? If you were to look at those and mitigate them by changing deadlines, staggering deadlines between projects, you might eliminate those peaks altogether. So this helps you understand that and what the business need might be. As a general observation of application usage in any company, you have very low usage from Thanksgiving time onwards through to January. It’s just because people are not working. Come back in the office in January, you get another little dip around end of Q1, peak of activity in the spring, and then vacations kick in. And then a little bit more in early autumn or early fall. So you get peaks in September and you get them in April. The question is, do you want to have your entire licensing model or configuration based around those peaks? So the heat map is really valuable in combination with your license efficiency chart to drive down what you can take your entitlements down to.

[21:12] Into the mix as well is looking at your users, when they were last used, running a report on that. And if you’re in a named user environment obviously this is crucial, you want to know when the last time they were used, have people moved on from your organization, have they changed role. So running a days since last used is very powerful in combination with those other ones to help you bring down what your license need might be.

[21:43] And of course, what does this mean financially? So if NX MAC1, which was the module we were looking at, is around $14,000 for the subscription for that tool per year. You know, 55 licenses is pretty expensive. If you go from 55 down to 41 at $14,000 per user, you’re going to save just under $200,000 with that saving down to your 100% of your usage. However, if with analysis of your usage you can take that down to 99%, and it’s another huge chunk of licenses, you can make a saving of $440,000. It’s very significant, just for that 1% of tolerance on your licensing to bring you down.

[22:31] And just very quickly on the other levels of the other offerings of LicenseAnalyzer™. The kinds of analysis I showed you there are on level one, which is looking at the check-in and checkouts, named user, and the percentile graphs. In addition you can have level two where an agent is deployed on desktops or cloud VMs. It’s kind of agnostic of what your platform is, and you tell it which executable you want to look at and it will tell you your idle time. So within a particular threshold or criteria, an hour or two hours, it will start telling you whether it’s being used or not. And it’s looking at CPU usage, memory, I/O, mouse, keyboard activity associated with that executable according to that time threshold that you’ve told it to.

[23:31] You can run a report on that and then you’ll see, well, now this could be entirely legitimate because of the complexity of these applications. Users may log them out at the beginning of the day but then need to go on other tasks, go to meetings, but they’re leaving those applications open because they’re complex and require work to set up. This level two will tell you what the scale of those applications being checked out is but not being used. And if you’ve got a large prize there in terms of hours that are not being utilized properly, you can have level three which will automatically harvest those licenses and bring them back into the pool. And this is very successful on the Siemens suite, and it will allow you to take those licenses and take them back into the pool, letting you serve a larger amount of users with a smaller pool of licenses.

[24:29] So quickly wrapping up, complex hybrid environment, named users, concurrent licensing, token usage, consumption usage, with a complex set of applications. Viewing them with Power BI is perfect to give you a handle on that and let you see those different licensing methods using Open iT technology together, who is using them, and when and why. And what does Open iT do for you based on that? It’s a completeness of solution across so many applications, engineering and enterprise, a very rich amount of data. It’s agnostic of licensing type, it’ll give you that information irrespective. It’ll also work with your in-house or bespoke developed applications. It doesn’t really matter where your applications are installed, it can read them. But additionally Open iT likes to partner with you, provide advice, and work with you over time to make sure you’re getting the best out of the tool, to give you the best analysis as you bring in new tools, or you want to bring in harvesting or different types of licensing into your analysis, to give you the best possible results.

[25:49] Okay, that was a little bit of a fly-through. I’m just about done, 26 minutes. A couple of minutes left. Back to you Nix in the studio if we have any questions.

[26:02] Nix: Yes, thank you for the deep dive David. Simple rarely means easy but you did a good job explaining things. We have some questions here. So let’s jump to the Q&A. So for the first question, does Open iT support automated license harvesting and prepare for peak demand?

[26:22] David: Sure. So I alluded a little bit to the automated harvesting there, and actually that is quite, the level three as it’s known, is quite successful on the Siemens suite. And on automated harvesting it’s easy to think, or the first impression is if you’re in IT or you’re a manager you might think, oh well it’s harvesting, that seems very intrusive. I’m not sure users will like that. They might feel that it’s impinging on their work. But it actually gives them a lot of freedom because they don’t need to worry about being a good citizen. They don’t need to worry about getting that phone call from the boss or somebody down the corridor, hey, you’re hogging licenses, because the automated nature of it means that those licenses go back into the pool without any manual intervention from them. So it’s actually both successful and popular, which is not something you might initially think when you hear about license harvesting.

[27:16] Nix: Thanks David. Actually, someone commented that no one in their org is seeing any sharing. Rest assured we will have a recording of this session, so you can go back through that session on demand. So, thank you David. Following up with another question, how can we find which Siemens licensing model is most cost effective for us? Tokens, subscriptions, or concurrent licenses?

[27:45] David: I mean, that’s the real question you want answered, isn’t it? When you bring those together, I would definitely use Power BI for that and have cohort analysis. And by that I mean, look at the user job title and then look at that user and then look at the number of hours and then have a metric around your cost per day or your cost per hour, and change between those ones to see which is being most efficient for you, whether it’s the consumption, whether it’s the token, or whether it’s the classic concurrent. Because if you have occasional users that’s going to be a very different need from heavy users. And you need to be able to quickly open and close that graph to see who’s best suited for consumption and who’s best suited for named user or concurrent. So yeah, Power BI is your friend, and an integration with Active Directory. The more data, the more detailed the story.

[28:53] Nix: So yeah, thank you David. And lastly we have here another question. Can Open iT identify underused bundles or inactive users before renewals?

[29:04] David: I mean, yeah, so definitely, and that’s where it’s important to look over time and to identify, to run that report of who hasn’t accessed for a long period of time. What named users do you have that you can say, well, they haven’t used it. Narrow your time period down to what you feel is important. And don’t have the attitude, we’ve always done it that way, this is what we paid last year, we must pay it again, because your business is evolving so quickly that you are best to look at those peak time periods and outside those peak time periods to make a judgment. And if you have an annual and, as we get to the end of November, typically license agreements are coming up with a 30-day renewal period. Now is the time, or last week was the time, to run those reports. Don’t wait till the 1st of December before doing that because the chances are it’s going to be too late to make those changes. But yeah, get those views I showed you where you can just quickly look over time, the console view, you can stretch over time very quickly and see beginning of the year versus end of the year, third quarter versus fourth quarter, to understand what you need and make those decisions.

[30:28] Nix: Thanks David. And I think that’s all we have for the Q&A session time. We also have an additional question here, but we’ll be sure to follow up via email or reach out through LinkedIn. So, that ends our webinar for today. You will get, as I mentioned earlier, a link to this recording in your email shortly alongside the webinar recordings. You will also find a link to our survey, and we would greatly appreciate it if you could send us your feedback and any topics you’d like for us to cover. You can also visit our webinar on demand page at openit.com to access the recording, or scan the code on your screen to take the survey. If you’d like a closer look at how Open iT can help simplify and optimize your Siemens licensing strategy, we’re offering a free 30-minute consultation with one of our business solutions consultants. If you’re already an Open iT customer, feel free to reach out directly to your account manager for next steps. Contact us using the details displayed on the screen and follow us on social media at Open iT, Inc. to get more insights and updates. Once again, I’m Nix. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time. Thank you.