Drive Cost Optimization for your Enterprise with Software Usage Metering

[0:00] Keith: To start the webinar off I would like to introduce you to your speaker Jim Muckle of Open iT. Jim, would you please start the presentation.

[0:09] Jim: I’d be happy to start the presentation Keith, thank you so much for allowing us into your screens today. Wonderful, again we want to thank everybody who took the time to come in today and discuss with us these important notions and processes we’ll say for driving cost optimization for your enterprise with software usage metering. My name is Jim Muckle, I’m an account executive for Open iT and Open iT is a company that has devoted itself to this issue for just over 20 years now. This first screen we sometimes get a little giggle out of because this is what we sometimes feel that we see when we walk into organizations that call us in. The traditional way of cutting costs can often be a tug-of-war and oftentimes the result of that tug-of-war can be driven by powers that maybe are not supported by the underlying data and this is the kind of thing that we like to help our customers with.

[1:14] Most of our customers ask and want to make sure how much of their budget is being spent on software and hardware that’s being effectively used and one of the questions that they have is how much of their budget is being spent on items that are not being effectively used. We’ve had some talks with the Forrester organization about this and they’ve been kind enough to share some data from their spectrum of companies that we thought might be helpful in this discussion. The source for this data again is Forrester organization and this is from their Forrester’s budgets and priorities tracker survey from Q2 of last year and when they asked their customers what the five most important corporate business priorities were over the next 12 months I think it’s no surprise to see the number one priority being to grow the overall company revenue. But close behind that right on its heels is lowering the firm’s overall operating costs and then we see after that acquiring and retaining customers, which is also very understandable, we see a strong desire to improve their products and processes and to improve their workforce productivity. And so we quickly get into a situation where improving these types of things is going to rely strongly on the IT organization.

[2:53] And as a result we went a little bit further with Forrester and we took a look at what their top priorities were for IT and improving IT efficiency in order to reach these corporate goals. So when their companies were asked the question which of the following initiatives are likely to be your IT organization’s top IT management priorities over the next 12 months, they were able to show us which items were high priority and which were considered critical by their companies. The efficiency of IT was by far the number one high priority and certainly the most critical with 50% saying it was a high priority and 31% characterizing it as critical. Improving the business processes was quickly behind that and improving the customer management capabilities of course right on the heels as well. Just below that we see increasing the IT capacity and the resources to drive business innovations and this becomes so important because oftentimes what we have found in organizations that have not perhaps done as good a job as they would like to in improving the efficiency of their IT, we see that their ability to increase their capacity and to effectively deploy their resources is difficult for them because so much of their capacity is already taken up with the costs and the burdens of previous decisions and previous, whether it be hardware or software really, that comes into the organization that needs to be supported. And so much of the organization can be oriented toward supporting that that it can really be very difficult to drive business innovation and to increase IT capacity in those areas where innovation is calling for it. And then we see the increasing the scope of IT centralized and shared services and improving the measurement of IT’s impact on business performance. Once we start looking at improving the measurement of course implicit in that discussion is being able to measure and this is where so many of our customers have asked us to step in and assist them.

[5:19] When we do look at the IT expenditures whether it be capex or opex we do see inefficiency play itself out in a number of ways. I’m sure these ways will not be a surprise to anybody but just to briefly review, when we look at capex many times what we’ll notice is that there has been over-provisioning. That over-provisioning can take place for any number of reasons but many times we find that over-provisioning takes place because there’s simply a lack of good information as to what the proper provisioning amounts are and therefore in order to protect against under-provisioning we often find over-provisioning to have taken place in these customers of ours. We also notice low utilization, this is really not too surprising because when we do see over-provisioning we naturally see low utilization as well for that portion of the provisioning that is over-provisioned. That is, when you have purchased too many computers or too many software licenses then the ones that are not really needed go without utilization. Needless to say we also see unnecessary redundancies leading to the misallocation of resources and devices. Poor needs assessment is often in this mix as well and again what we have found is that it is difficult to do a proper needs assessment if you do not have the underlying data with which to do the needs assessment or with which to evaluate the needs. We often find in these situations that people can become overly conservative as a reaction to what they’re having to deal with and that this can also lead to inadequate capacity planning which obviously is frustrating in and of itself.

[7:14] That’s on the capex side. On the operational expenditure side we’ll also see these types of characteristics in inefficient setups. We’ll see low IT asset to IT admin ratios so the degree to which we’re spending money on administering the assets can be higher than what it should be. We also see poor operational best practices and a lack of policy enforcement or energy management. We sometimes see inadequate skills and inadequate system management. Again all of this seems to stem from a maelstrom of inefficient and lack of data-driven decision-making processes and that’s where optimization can often come in.

[8:09] When there is a desire to standardize the justification process for new IT investments our clients often breathe a huge sigh of relief when they are able to justify their requests with measurable IT usage data. And not only do our clients breathe a sigh of relief but the people up the chain of command to whom they need to justify these requests, they also breathe a sigh of relief because they’re finally seeing requests based on measurable IT usage. Needless to say the ability to document how assets have been used over time is extraordinarily helpful in providing a context for decisions as to how to bring online new IT investments as well as cutting waste and documenting actual shortages. All in all what this leads clients to be able to do is to make sound investment decisions based on usage data and not based on other things, perhaps politics or the emotions of the moment.

[9:22] And reactions to things that can happen, when companies finally begin to get insight into the use of their IT resources we do notice that they prefer multiple views and not just a single view. They do like to see that usage data segmented by business unit or location, they also like to see it segmented by application or application suites in some cases, they often like to see it by user or user group, they like to break out fixed from variable costs, and they like to see it broken out by vendor and by project.

[10:00] Now when we start talking about software license agreements and getting usage data for those, it’s helpful sometimes to just revisit the fact that there are many different software license agreements that are out there and the usage data that supports each of these can vary and in fact sometimes does need to vary in order to properly support these licensing agreements. So just a brief and quick review, what we’ll see is server-based licensing or CPU based or core-based licensing depending on the software. Many times of course we’ll see licensing based on named users where each person has access to a license based on their name. We’ll also see concurrent licensing scenarios where licenses are shared among users, we typically see this with very expensive software that is served on license manager servers. Enterprise licensing is also something that companies will be looking at often times and many times the way that they’ll accommodate this is either by having an open-ended agreement or having an agreement with a very high number of licenses to begin with just to make sure that they cover their global enterprise. We also in the past decade in particular have seen the increase in the number of pay per use licensing arrangements where companies will pay software vendors for their software based on the company’s actual use of the software. Here of course usage data is extremely important for both the company and the software provider. And also we see a combination of these various software licensing schemes in some rather interesting ways in some cases but this sort of summarizes what we see in companies these days.

[12:07] If you take that as a background then what Open iT actually does is Open iT becomes a global hub for usage data in the enterprise and this screen is designed simply to show Open iT placing itself as the hub in the organization so that the usage metering is taking place throughout the enterprise and reporting back to that central hub from which reports can be run, into which interactive views of the data can be seen from the various users throughout the organization that have the access to do so.

[12:55] Just as a brief overview before we get into some of these specifics, our customers are really quite happy with some of the results that they’ve seen. Murphy Oil for example in their first year saved $1.35 million, needless to say they were thrilled with that. Avio has accounted for a 47% annual savings on their engineering applications and of course those are quite expensive. And Nissan in the automotive sector has attributed a 10% cost reduction on their overall software licenses to the utilization of this type of approach in their organization.

[13:36] I’m going to show you one specific example and this example came from a company known as Burlington Resources. We’re able to use these specific numbers here because Burlington is no longer in business as a single entity, they were acquired by a much larger company ConocoPhillips, and we do have permission to share this. So this is what we will typically see. In this case of Burlington Resources you see when they first contacted us in what we refer to as year zero the portion of their IT budget for software that was already bound up in paying for maintenance was virtually all of their budget. They had very little headroom remaining to enable them to acquire new software and of course that new software is one of the things that they wanted to be able to acquire to reach those goals that we saw at the beginning of the presentation, improving workforce productivity for example and lowering their overall operating costs by getting in better software. Needless to say they were a bit hamstrung here.

[14:47] What they did is they went ahead and installed Open iT and here’s what they experienced. In year one they experienced a 36% reduction in their software maintenance costs over year zero. What you see now on top of that is that enabled them additional headroom to acquire what at that point was a backlog of requests for updated software, software that did the job more efficiently and helped their organization better, and they were able to acquire that software and still reduce their overall IT budget year-over-year. Similarly in year two they experienced an additional 19% reduction in their software maintenance costs and mind you this is even after the acquisition of all that new software in year one, they were still able to reduce their software maintenance costs even further. And they had room for the acquisition of additional new software which you see in the orange square on top there in year two. And then finally in year three which was the last year before they got acquired, even with all that new software they were still able to drive additional software maintenance costs out of their budget and you see they did quite an acquisition in year three of new software as well. But all in all this is the type of scenario that we see played out over and over again in the companies that are seeking to increase their IT efficiency with the use of proper data-driven tools. In the case of Burlington Resources their cost savings over those three years was $5 million.

[16:33] Pardon me for interjecting this but I was just in a company meeting with one of our clients last week and they are not on our slide and I don’t have permission to mention them by name but they said that over a five-year period they’ve saved $10 million so I mentioned that just by way of saying that these dollar amounts are not unusual to us to see in these clients that are pursuing IT efficiency.

[17:03] So a question we often get is well where do you put your agents and how do you mature this model in a company that chooses to go this route. And what we’ve seen in terms of a maturity model for companies is that the first line of effort will be in identifying which spectrum of sources for usage data you want to gather usage data from. Many times for the expensive software, clients will have license managers on servers which will entitle those software licenses for their users and they’ll also have a number of, and in fact a great number of, applications that run on the desktop. Many times in our organizations they will also ask us to place metering agents on the CPU, on the database, on the network, or on storage. And basically what we’re trying to show here is that wherever in the enterprise you need to place usage metering agents in order to get the usage data you need to support the decision-making process that you’re involved in, that’s where we put the metering agents.

[18:22] In addition to that we noticed in our clients a variation, a spectrum if you will, of the degree of interaction they want to have with the usage data. Typically what we see at the beginning of a process is that companies will want to put in the agents in order to monitor and report on the actual usage. This of course is a sound first step in the process. And then what we’ll notice is that as companies become comfortable with the monitoring and the reporting of the usage data they will actually begin to use that data in higher level discussions in which a great deal more analysis will take place, perhaps even modeling of new software agreements and the integration of these metering agent systems into other processes and other tools that they have in their organization. So this basically shows the two axes along which we notice maturity of this process as companies step into it.

[19:28] Starting in the lower quadrant if you will, if we’re just going to do monitoring and reporting of licenses at a license manager level then you’ll see things like stop and start metering and feature by feature reports and server by server reports. All of these things are basically designed to answer a simple question and an important question. That question is what is the difference between the number of licenses that the company has purchased and the number of licenses that are actually being checked out on these license manager servers.

[20:09] An example of a report that might show that kind of information is on your screen now. Here we see in the bold red line across the top the number of licenses that this particular client had purchased, I’m going to guess that’s about 190 licenses. And then below that we see the maximum number of licenses that are ever actually in use and we see that that maximum does come up quite close to the number of licenses purchased. And this is an example of a client that’s been on the system for a while and has been able to reset the number of licenses that they are paying software maintenance on to be almost exactly the number that they need in actual use among their users.

[21:00] Now we’ll often get a question from clients at that point that say well okay, now that I’ve been able to identify the difference between the number of licenses we purchased and the number of licenses that are being checked out and I’ve been able to reduce the number of licenses that we’re paying for to be the number of licenses that are getting checked out, let me ask a further question. What about the number of licenses that are checked out but are not actually in use. And this is a very insightful question and it does require the placement of a metering agent at the source of the application itself, whether that be on the desktop or a remote terminal server. And that agent will monitor things like CPU usage, IO, mouse, keyboard activity, it can even monitor the DLL and executable depending on your requirements, all in an effort to show you active versus inactive use. And again this is to answer the question what is the difference between the number of licenses that are being checked out and the number of licenses that are actually being used after they’re checked out.

[22:15] An example of a report that shows this, this is from a client that had just installed Open iT, and you see here they had 290 licenses that they had purchased. Clearly they were over-provisioned because the number of licenses they ever had in concurrent use at one time was 265 as a maximum. That’s a difference of 25 licenses. And I beg your pardon guys, I’m so sorry, I got my math off there. It is 25 licenses at $30,000 and that’s not a difference of a million, 50,000, that’s actually a difference of $750,000. Now what the clients really wanted to know was okay, now that we understand that we can reduce the number of licenses we’re paying for to more closely match the number of licenses being checked out, let’s look a little bit more closely and see what happens with those licenses after they’re checked out, are they actually in use. And in this client what they were able to discover was that even when they had the maximum number of concurrent licenses checked out of 265, the actual number of licenses in use at that point never exceeded 150. Clearly that was an even greater delta and in that case this delta is 115 licenses which is $3.45 million. This is the type of thing that companies discover when they put in the correct direct tools that can properly gather and report this type of data to them.

[24:01] The usage data itself, now as I mentioned before, once companies become comfortable with the monitoring and reporting of this usage data now they begin, as in our experience we see them begin to incorporate this data at a higher level. And they begin to ask themselves questions like okay well how can we restructure or remix our software license agreements in order to be more efficient and have a more efficient use of budget for the licenses that we’re trying to provide to our users. In this case we’ll often see many analytical reports begin to be put together and this is where we begin to see the use of dashboards where companies will identify various consumers of the usage data throughout their enterprise and identify for each one of those consumers what type of context they want to see usage data in. Therefore the ability of a dashboard to be one dashboard for user A and a completely different dashboard for user B becomes very important in these organizations so that everybody in the organization that is now beginning to rely on usage data itself to make their decisions can see that usage data in the context that is most meaningful for them.

[25:32] And finally what we’ll see in organizations is that once we get to this level we will see organizations begin to establish a rules-based framework that actively recaptures licenses that are checked out but are not in actual use. The way this begins to happen is again based on the system’s ability to identify those situations where licenses are turned on or checked out and then based on monitoring reveal that the licenses are not actually being used, that the application itself is not in use. What the system can be configured to do then is to automatically react and to go recapture those licenses that are not in actual use. One particular example that I inserted here is from a software package known as Petrel, it’s in the oil and gas industry. I’m not trying to pick on Petrel here but this was just an example of a dialogue box that would go to a user that would say hey, knock knock, we noticed that you checked out a license for Petrel but we also notice that you’re not using it so can you tell us please, are you really there, are you really using it, are you about to use it. And if we get no response within a certain configurable amount of time then the system can respond by doing things like suspending the license, freezing the session, returning the license back to the user pool so that it is available for other users who do need to use that software.

[27:33] Again this is the type of thing that leads to the documented savings that we showed at the beginning of the presentation. And in closing just mention a little bit about Open iT because I often forget to do that. Open iT is an independent software vendor with offices throughout the world, North America, Europe, and Asia. These offices enable us to follow a follow-the-sun strategy in terms of support globally. The company is financially solid and debt-free, thank goodness. Open iT meters the usage of software applications and licenses with functionality for globally deployed dynamic use models including concurrent licensing and pay per use agreements. Open iT also meters hardware usage to support the optimization and the use of chargeback models. Our key business values include harvesting unused licenses after we’ve identified them, cost optimizing for IT procurement and operations, increasing user productivity, and for the preparation of migration to the cloud. This of course is something we’re being called on increasingly to do here recently. Our key industry segments, energy, oil and gas, aerospace, defense, automotive, and one that I’ll add to that now is academic, we’ve had a lot of engineering departments and academic schools call on us as well. And that’s basically our presentation for today. I want to take the opportunity again to say thank you very much for tuning in and Keith I’d be happy to answer any questions if that’s helpful for you.

[29:15] Keith: Sure we have a few questions posted and remind the audience again if you have any questions please type your questions into the question box. One question is how is the product licensed and what are the approximate prices.

[29:32] Jim: Wow, that is a good question. It’s an awkward question for me in this setting. I will say this though, I have consistently been told by those clients with whom I’ve dealt personally that they very much like our licensing model. Our licensing model is based on the number of users that are being monitored and that means that we don’t care if those users are using 10 different PCs and two laptops or they’re accessing software that is positioned on 10 different license servers around the globe and using 25 vendor daemons for example. None of that matters to us. We are simply giving our companies the ability to monitor X number of users and once they monitor for example 50 users then for the same price they can monitor those users’ use of a single application or of a hundred applications. It is immaterial to us so it’s very straightforward and is designed in a way to be very very clear to our companies. I hope that’s a helpful enough answer without getting into too many specifics. And by the way whoever asked me that question Keith, if you want to steer them directly to me I’d be happy to have a more in-depth discussion with them if they’d like.

[31:04] Keith: Sure. Okay, can you monitor usage of individual components of a suite?

[31:11] Jim: Generally the answer is yes. I will say that we periodically run into some suites that for whatever reason make that very cloudy, make the discernment of which individual applications within a suite are actually in use. But that being said I would also say that by virtue of our ability to place metering agents in the most surprising of places we are often able to pierce the veil that a software vendor might otherwise be trying to establish in that case. I’m not trying to sound too critical or point the finger at anyone in particular but we have had several instances where an independent software vendor has made it at first blush very difficult to discern what individual applications are being checked out and actually used in a suite but we have since been able to sort of navigate our way around that and be able to reveal that information to the company who’s using that software. It took a little bit of work but it’s the kind of challenging thing that we like to do. I don’t know if that’s a complete answer for you, I hope it is.

[32:34] Keith: Can the Open iT product dovetail onto existing SAM systems specifically Altiris where agents may already be installed on enterprise IT assets.

[32:42] Jim: I love this question because for me it gets to the degree to which a company can leverage their existing investment by tying it into Open iT. If you recall that slide in which Open iT was installed as a central global hub for the repository, the database of usage information, we are able to accept data from other sources and have done that a number of times. Now I personally have not had any of my clients use Altiris, I would have to look into that one. But SMS, SCCM, I’ve seen that fairly often. Pardon me for not knowing about Altiris. Here again Keith if you’d like to put that individual in touch with me I can probably look that up and have that answer for them by the time they contact me.

[33:38] Keith: Okay. On what OS platforms are the metering agents capable of running, for example does it run on Unix platforms.

[33:45] Jim: Oh thank you for asking that question and shame on me for not having been more clear about that. Yeah we are OS agnostic, Linux, Unix, Windows, not a problem for us. The only thing I haven’t seen us do so far is a Mac environment.

[34:08] Keith: Okay. Does your product uninstall the application in addition to harvesting the license.

[34:15] Jim: This is a great question because it actually gets to the nuts and bolts of how we do what we do. So let me answer this in a general way and also encourage the questioner to get in touch with me if he or she would like to. In general the answer to that type of question is this, it completely depends on what tools we have available based on the license manager we’re working with and sometimes based on the application itself. Let me give you an example. Some license manager servers enable us to deploy certain functionality that other license manager servers don’t and so the way we accomplish that might have to be different depending on the underlying server. As for the application itself, sometimes we run into an application that has a direct tie into the database and if we were to suspend that session we would also interrupt the access of any other open application to the database. And so in these types of situations we have to be careful but the good news is we are careful and we are experienced. So I’m sort of left with the general answer right now that is it really depends on the specific situation and what tools we have available to us in that situation. And generally I encourage anyone who’s asking that question to contact us so that we can discuss in more detail the specific situation that they might be thinking of.

[35:54] Keith: Okay, what about licenses that are purchased without maintenance. Once you determine you’re not using X amount of licenses, your savings going forward is redeployment to new users, is this correct.

[36:09] Jim: Keith, I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understood that question, could I ask you to repeat it please.

[36:16] Keith: Sure, what about licenses that have been purchased but without maintenance. Once you determine you’re not using X amount of licenses, your savings going forward is redeployment to new users, is that correct.

[36:23] Jim: Oh okay, well this brings up an interesting facet. Obviously what drives us and what drives our companies to contact us is cost optimization. So generally we’re involved on those licenses where they’re spending money. Now all of the software functionality that I’ve reviewed in the presentation would certainly apply to any license whether you’re actually paying maintenance for it or not. That’s not something that the software would know in and of itself, whether you’re actually on maintenance or not. So Keith could you tell me, am I answering that question or am I missing the point.

[37:13] Keith: No, I think what’s being asked here is you know the cost savings that you demonstrated in your presentation were because of reduction in maintenance costs. If without the maintenance purchase you have already outlaid purchase for the licenses themselves, basically the product does give you the ability to monitor usage so that you can redeploy or harvest and redeploy instead of actually going out and purchasing new.

[37:42] Jim: Yes, I think you said it very well.

[37:49] Keith: Okay. How do you handle licenses that must be assigned to a machine yet do not allow concurrency.

[37:58] Jim: Licenses that must be assigned to a machine but do not allow concurrency. Okay, well clearly in those situations where concurrency is not an issue we would not be focusing on concurrency. We would still be focusing on whether or not the license is actually being activated, in other words is it being turned on, is the license being accessed. And then once the license is accessed is it actually in use. Again our focus here is being able to provide usage information on that license irrespective of whether or not it’s in a concurrent type of agreement or not. And hopefully that usage information is able to reveal the necessary information in a decision-making process as to whether to continue the use of that license or maybe redeploy it for somebody else, depending on what the usage metering would reveal for you.

[39:03] Keith: Okay. Will you be making the presentation available via PDF.

[39:12] Jim: Keith, I can convert this to a PDF and get it over to you, would that be all that I need to do for you.

[39:21] Keith: I believe so, yes.

[39:23] Jim: I’d be happy to do that and email it to you after we get off the phone here.

[39:29] Keith: Okay. Are there any plans for supporting the Mac environment.

[39:38] Jim: Wow, you know the one thing they don’t tell me until we get close to things is they don’t tell me too much about what they’re working on. I wish I had an answer for you but I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if next month in our next meeting I’ll hear that they are, and at the same time I don’t want to imply that they’re close if in fact they aren’t. I just don’t have visibility into that, I’m sorry Keith.

[40:02] Keith: So in other words stay tuned.

[40:04] Jim: There you go, that might be the best answer.

[40:08] Keith: Okay. And how are you calculating the usage, is it based on the number of times a user opens the application.

[40:26] Jim: There are several aspects to usage. I mean elapsed time is often one of the things that we’re asked to report on but also just check in and check out, you know if they check it in and out eight or ten times a day that’s something we could also report on. Similarly we can report on if they tried to check it out but were denied because there were no licenses available. So it really depends on what aspect of that the folks need to get data on to support the decision-making process that they’re in.

[40:58] Keith: Okay. Another question is what about scale, can you handle 70,000 desktops and 50,000 users.

[41:07] Jim: Wow. Well I tell you what, I cannot divulge by name the companies that we do business with but if you were to think of the largest aeronautical firms and the largest oil and gas firms and the largest automotive firms around I think you’d sort of get the idea that we’re used to scale situations. I can’t say for sure that we have that many deployed in each of those and let me hasten to say that it would certainly depend on what type of usage information you’re trying to gather and how much network activity you’re generating as a result. I would love to talk to the person who asked that question and certainly if they’d like to we could share some more specific information with them. I have been asked to be conscious of not saying too much in the way of specifics about clients and things in a venue like this but we’re certainly happy to have more detailed discussions and we would welcome that if they would like to contact us.

[42:21] Keith: Okay. Would you say that your product is mainly aimed at vertical industries that utilize specific software solutions.

[42:28] Jim: Generally, the reason that, you know we’ve done some analysis on this, and the reason that Open iT has become so strong in those verticals is because in those verticals where they are focused on cost optimization their first steps in cost optimization were those licenses of extraordinarily expensive software on the technical side usually. And so we end up dealing with aeronautics, with energy and oil, and with automotive because the design software they use and the imaging software they use and all of that is so extraordinarily expensive. And even though they have let’s say you know 30,000 licenses of Microsoft throughout the organization and maybe they have five or 10% of that for a number of licenses on very expensive software, the reality was that if they focused first on the very expensive software the cost savings they were able to gather was so large that it actually dictated starting there. So that’s why we are as prominent in those industries as we are. Now what we’ve seen those companies do is they begin to expand that cost optimization effort from the purely technical arena into the rest of their applications. So that explains why we’re so strong with our clients in those vertical businesses but there’s nothing innately in the software that requires that you be in one of those verticals. It just so happens that that’s the way our growth has been, it’s all been organic growth.

[44:18] Keith: Okay. For usage monitoring can your application determine what a user has done within the application. So the example here is with Visio, is the user just launching the app to view a drawing in which case you could give them a viewer instead of the full Visio application.

[44:41] Jim: Yeah this is where the level of metering becomes very important. I don’t know if you remember that one slide where we talked about the ability to monitor CPU, IO, keyboard, and mouse activity. But there also, if we need to go down to the DLL or the executable level and make finer grain determinations of what’s actually being used, we can do that. Of course there are always limitations, we can only work with what we’ve got to work with and so I think a more specific conversation would probably be had here with our Technical Services folks that are the ones used to doing things like this. But in general we are capable of revealing quite a bit about what happens with a license after it’s checked out based on our ability to meter down to the DLL and the executable level if necessary.

[45:41] Keith: Okay. When you say check in and check out does this imply that it only applies to concurrency.

[45:48] Jim: I can see where someone might assume that and I guess what drove my presentation here is the maturity model where people start with the expensive software that is often concurrently licensed. But if I understand your question correctly Keith, you’re not restricted to a concurrent model for this software to be of use and valuable. Again it’s just where we started in the presentation. The ability to gather usage data in and of itself is not restricted to a concurrent model.

[46:26] Keith: Okay. Is your client lightweight and non-intrusive. Engineers as you may know are very sensitive to any background processes consuming CPU or network bandwidth. And I’d like to add to that we see a lot of asset managers that struggle with the server administrations group putting clients on the servers because of the concern regarding network bandwidth or consuming resources on the server.

[46:57] Jim: Yes, great question. And without exception what we’ve been able to show our clients is that we’re very lightweight. And another aspect of this is this is where we get into discussions about plugging into existing established infrastructure. For example whether it’s SMS or SCCM and possibly even Altiris, I’ll have to look into that, where the organization has already committed a certain amount of resources to having some metering at these individual locations and then we just plug into that so that we’re not augmenting that footprint. But even in those cases where we’re not leveraging an existing footprint our solution is very lightweight and consistently the clients with whom I’ve dealt have been impressed with how lightweight it is.

[47:57] Keith: I believe that is all the questions for now. Oh, one more popped in. When viewing licenses by user is the owner determined by last log on, when determining usage by user is the owner determined by last log on.

[48:11] Jim: Wow, we would save the most challenging question for last. Yeah Keith, it probably isn’t going to surprise you that an account executive may not be able to answer all those technical questions. And I just, I don’t want to pretend that I know. I’m sure there is an answer here. Let me put it this way, I do know that in many of my customers’ cases what we’re actually doing is we’re plugging into the active directory or the LDAP so that the identification of the user is clear and based on integration with their existing authentication and so forth. But this sounds like the kind of question that I can slip on and I don’t want to inadvertently give an incorrect answer. May I ask for permission to ask that user to contact me if they have a burning desire for that and let me commit to getting them an accurate answer on that.

[49:10] Keith: Sure, sure. Okay, I think that’s it for the questions today. I’d like to thank everyone for participating in today’s webinar and I would especially like to thank our presenter Jim Muckle. As I stated earlier all remaining questions will be answered via email so if you have any more you can send those in. The recording will be available soon from the IAM website at www.iaitam.org. For additional information or to direct additional questions to our speaker please feel free to use the contact information on the final slide. This concludes today’s presentation, again thank you all for participating. Have a great day.