Taming the Complexity of your Autodesk Licensing

[0:00] Lynn: All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good day everyone and welcome to the Open iT ITAM webinar, taming the complexity of your Autodesk licensing. My name is Lynn Weiss and I’m from ITAM and I’m going to be the moderator and host for today’s webinar. As usual, some logistical issues before we get things started. Everyone’s line is muted except of course for our speakers. So if you have any questions for our presenter please enter it in either the chat or the questions window. And hopefully if we have enough time at the end of the session we’ll get to those questions, otherwise I will forward the information on to Carl and we’ll make sure he addresses them via email after the event is over. And for anyone that’s interested, Open iT will be making a PDF of the presentation itself available to any interested party. Of course they will be sending you some information about that after the event is finished in order for you to get that copy.

[1:19] So to get things moving along, one of the things we want to do is first introduce you to our speaker, Carl Leweke. He is the account manager for Open iT, Incorporated, and has been in the oil and gas industry for over 26 years in many capacities. His industry experience mostly includes management of deepwater and wireline accounts including operations planning, contracts, market analysis, forecasting, account analysis, client relations, billing and payments. He employs his broad understanding of deepwater offshore operations to advise clients on how to utilize technology such as software metering, optimizing application usage, and maximizing asset value and user productivity. So to get the webinar moving I’m going to open up Carl’s mic and get him to start the presentation.

[2:13] Carl: Okay, thanks for the introduction Lynn. Good morning to everybody. As you said, I’m Carl Leweke with Open iT and I want to welcome you to today’s ITAM webinar, taming the complexity of Autodesk licensing. So on behalf of Open iT I’d also like to thank ITAM for hosting these webinars to help us explore areas of current interest in IT management. And of course the extensive presence of Autodesk software throughout the entire world, and some recent licensing changes, seem to have resulted in an increased interest in these sorts of topics of licensing, especially with Autodesk. So I appreciate everyone’s attendance.

[2:58] And today we’ll be discussing the management of Autodesk licensing changes that have occurred over, I say, the last year or so, maybe a little more than a year depending on what part of the world you’re in. But basically with the goal of providing your organizations with insight as to how these changes can be better managed by understanding the options and fitting them into your particular organization with the use of software metering. So in this webinar we’ll discuss the various licensing types for Autodesk and some of the pros and cons of each. We’ll eventually try to highlight some strategies to make better informed decisions when the sorts of changes to these licensing positions are needed, especially in light of the Autodesk licensing changes in their schemes. And this webinar is going to be of interest to anyone who’s managing Autodesk licensing, particularly if your current overall Autodesk license usage is not very well understood. It can also serve as a guideline for implementing better Autodesk management practices. So we’ll actually dive into a few case studies, show some report examples, and it’ll be possible to see how you can utilize software usage metering and optimization tools. These are valuable for anyone negotiating, purchasing, or managing Autodesk licensing, and we’ll wrap up with just a review of the standard options and recommendations for choosing the best subscription plans or licensing scheme combinations for a given company.

[4:27] So basically what we’ve got is that Autodesk announced plans, as I mentioned, worldwide changes to their licensing back in 2015, and they’ve pretty much phased out perpetual licensing completely for their software at this point. And their ongoing subscription offerings continue to allow access to a wide variety of products sharing floating licenses, a lot of the things that were previously possible with traditional perpetual licensing that everyone was quite familiar with. So Autodesk touted this as a gradual change with a myriad of benefits to customers, and clearly there’s a lot going on more than just benefits to customers. But across the entire software landscape really, as internet and cloud computing grow, there’s an increased interest from software vendors in transitioning all of their software to a similar sales model, and usually this is an alternative to what has been traditional outright software ownership. And the benefits of that to the software vendors include getting a more stable, predictable income stream, with really it turns out higher long-term profitability for them, as long as they can continue to get people to renew their subscriptions.

[5:42] So from a customer standpoint Autodesk touts that they offer better flexibility, better value. But a lot of people were very concerned about the perceived price increase and that led to skepticism about who is going to benefit most, was it the users or was it Autodesk. And additionally, a lot of the change, the constant change that you get where you’ve got cloud applications that are being updated regularly, a lot of people are becoming more familiar with, more accepting of, when you look at cellular phones and apps that are coming out all the time. That concept of continual change, continually updating and improving, is probably a little bit more accepted than it was a few years ago. So really after the initial shock I think the world will just have to adjust to the new environment.

[6:37] So of course when the changes were announced customers had a lot of questions and concerns, and they expressed a lot of these in the online forums. And for Autodesk’s sake they created some very solid FAQ documents to educate customers and alleviate concerns. So there is really a lot of good info on the web when they started this process. But really what it comes down to, as I mentioned, there’s no more perpetual licenses. So globally it’s not possible to add any more perpetual licenses to any perpetual or any legacy perpetual plans that anyone may have. But legacy perpetual license usage can continue and will continue just as it did before, as long as the maintenance subscription is maintained. Updates and support under those sorts of maintenance subscriptions will continue to be available. But if that maintenance subscription ever lapses then the eligibility for updates and enhancements dies forever with that perpetual agreement.

[7:32] And Autodesk has made strong assurances that maintenance plans will be continued for what they call the foreseeable future. But it also has to be recognized that Autodesk will likely incentivize voluntary discontinuation of perpetual maintenance agreements by giving people price breaks on the newer types of subscriptions. I don’t think they probably want to maintain both models any longer than they have to, just for cost concerns on their part. And it’s of course notable that the initial costs for subscriptions are less but for long-term users subscriptions end up costing more. The flexibility for downsizing and adjusting software for changing usage is much easier under cloud or subscription environments. And something called cloud credits are actually available with a lot of the subscription plans that come out now, and that allows for some specialty needs that may require highly intense computing. It takes advantage of the scalable environment in the cloud, and these are for things like rendering photo-quality images of designs or doing some intensive software simulations.

[8:56] So just to take a look at what they offer now versus what they offered before, this is a view of the software licensing options. Until very recently, of course, buying the software outright with perpetual licenses is not going to be possible anymore. And in place of the perpetual model there are standalone products that can be subscription-based for desktops, or they can be term-based licensing models which are available annually or quarterly. And the transition from software ownership with perpetual licensing to subscription-based licensing enables Autodesk really to continually innovate and improve their software desktop subscriptions and cloud offerings by integrating them with their cloud services. And that goes back to the model of software apps that are changing quickly and constantly, and the fact that people seem to have adapted pretty well and adopted that sort of a scheme. But it’s important to gain an understanding of how cloud capabilities can fit into an organization’s overall long-term needs going forward. So these changes are already in place.

[10:09] So at some point it’s going to be necessary to make the adjustments and move forward. And after a lot of hand-wringing and concern and apprehension that was voiced in the online forums, in the end it’s a done deal. It’s time to get on with things and try to use as optimistic a framework as possible, figure out how to use the new schemes to best advantage. And the industry pattern, as I’d mentioned, makes it likely that other software vendors will probably be following this same sort of pattern for licensing changes away from perpetual.

[10:39] So in summary, if you want to purchase one of the software products that are affected by this change, you’re pretty much going to have to purchase a new subscription license. And for those with perpetual licenses it’s important to stay current with your maintenance plans so that you can maintain that previous upfront investment that was made to purchase that license. So there are still a lot of remaining options. There are standalone options, network concurrent floating license options, Autodesk 360 which is their cloud-based option, there are still a lot of suite subscriptions, and there are also some enterprise business agreement options that are available, called the Multiflex or their Flex agreements. Multiflex is sort of mega-suite licensing, or Token Flex agreements which use something called cloud tokens, and those are used to pay for the software on a sort of pay-as-you-go, pay-per-use basis. And as I mentioned, the cloud credits can be used for simulations and things like that to purchase computing time online in order to do some high-powered options. And they’ve also got on their cloud offering some free options that are quite interesting, that allow for some collaboration and some cloud storage that are available many times free of charge. And so that’ll probably help with Autodesk fostering adoption of these cloud services.

[12:18] So understanding the current usage patterns and cost implications for each of these options is going to be important to getting the right licensing schemes and determining a combination of licenses that result in the best solution. So there’s of course the maintenance of legacy perpetual agreements, there are still individual software subscriptions and suite packages, and of course the enterprise options as well.

[12:42] So I’m going to just talk real quickly for those who may be involved in the Autodesk enterprise agreements. Basically there are the two options that I just mentioned and those will be negotiated pretty much by the heads of the company to come up with the best scheme for an individual organization. So the Flex offers universal usage, Multiflex offers universal usage of just about every software that Autodesk makes, but it’s very pricey for that ability to do that. And in order to negotiate a proper, advantageous agreement for your enterprise, it’s important to understand how the company uses Autodesk products company-wide. And that’s really the only way to negotiate a fair value for a Multiflex license system with Autodesk themselves. And of course users in subsidiary environments are going to have access to the software combinations as needed. They’re still going to need to figure out their usage in order, if they’re using the Token Flex option, to determine how many tokens they need and plan their year-long usage.

[13:56] So the transition from perpetual to subscription is not necessarily a huge problem, but what does turn out to be a big problem is not understanding how to make that transition with the proper analytics. So when planning the software purchase, licensing needs to be reviewed analytically to determine how many licenses are being used, how often they’re being used, what types are being used, and when they’re being used. And also software metering and optimization tools can be extremely helpful for determining whether to add or decrease the license position for a given software. And companies who aren’t managing their software licensing levels based on some sort of metered usage will be at a competitive disadvantage going forward to those who are actually proactively adopting optimizations. And so such metering is going to be a key component moving forward to managing Autodesk licensing and software management in general.

[15:09] So just according to a recent Gartner study, 90% of organizations implementing software management tools can expect about 30% average software savings. And looking at the average total software spend for most organizations, it’s pretty easy to make a return on investment decision based on that. And according to Gartner, by 2019 this adoption of analytics tools will have resulted in about a 30% decrease in enterprise license spending. So license management is a trend that companies are already recognizing as offering vital savings. And by looking a little bit more closely we’ll see how the mechanics of license optimization work.

[15:52] So there are a number of ways that we can get business value from in-depth metering and it can vary from organization to organization depending on the relative strengths and weaknesses of any given company. So certainly understanding usage from all angles is necessary to move toward higher efficiency, where licensing is at a proper level. And compliance is frankly a very significant consideration in getting proper licensing levels as well, especially when you look at the dollar amount numbers that are involved in some of the audits that take place and the resulting true ups to try to get current with what’s owed to a given software company. I’m sure anyone involved in IT is quite familiar with those. But in addition to the various financial advantages there are other considerations, like employee efficiency, making sure that they’ve got what they need to do their jobs efficiently, proactive budgeting, internal chargeback or showback so that various parts of an organization can understand the value of their particular software and what it would cost if they paid for it, or sometimes actually charging them for it. And those can actually drive more efficient behavior as well when that’s implemented. And if you’re getting license denials in your organization it’s important to understand when they’re occurring and why they’re occurring. And all this information can be useful to a wide range of managers if they understand the value of metering and what it can do for them. It could be IT managers, asset managers, even C-level people, CIO, CTO, CFOs.

[17:37] So let’s take a look at the most simplistic view of the management of licensing. So what we can see at the top is just a quantity of licenses purchased, and we can see that over time that’s increased. So a lot of times without any analysis tools all we really know is that maybe we’ve got some denials from time to time that are driving our users to either complain or say that they can’t get their job done properly. But without some analytics and understanding of actual licenses it’s difficult to understand what’s going on. So if we look at the blue line, that’s actually a list of licenses checked out, and we can see why they actually bumped up their licensing positions on a couple of different occasions. The total number of licenses checked out was bumping right up against that total number of licenses available. But what we can also see from this is that it wasn’t really occurring very often and that the average use was actually quite a bit below the licensing level there.

[18:34] So understanding that is pretty important. We can also see that after the second software licensing purchase that brought them up to 290, toward the end they really never needed to make that purchase. They were barely ever above the previous line of their software licensing level and pretty much all of those were wasted resources. So understanding the licenses checked out can be quite important.

[19:03] But really moving to the next level involves understanding when a license is checked out whether it’s actively being used or not. So that is what we show here in the red line, true active usage. And that’s done by determining whether someone either has a background process that they’ve kicked off with a given software or whether they’re actively having the keyboard or mouse of their computer associated with that application. And by understanding that, what we can see is the blue curve really never came below a hundred licenses checked out, and that’s nights and weekends and holidays and everything else. So you can see that it’s unlikely that there were more than a hundred people all that time with licenses that were actively being used. And when you see how many people actually have that software doing something on their computer with the red line, you can see that that number on the weekends, which are the low spots there, actually does approach zero in many instances, or certainly it never falls below 50 when activity is really quite high.

[20:08] So this is just a demonstration of how actual hard-dollar license savings can be understood. So based on the perceived needs, the last slide showed that they went up to a total of 290 licenses. Really they only had about 145 maximum concurrent active licenses used. So in this instance that’s a difference of about 50% or 145 licenses. So if we look at that as a relatively modestly expensive license, not a high-end engineering application or anything like that, at $5,000 a license you’re still looking at nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in savings in a year. So the ROI from that standpoint can be really significant with understanding and properly managing license usage with some tools.

[21:09] So what we see here, we’ll go through a series of Autodesk license report summaries. So this is just one that’s fairly simple. Optimizing based on true usage that we showed before is kind of a holy grail, but even some simple analytics can help quite a bit. So this is just a simple report showing various Autodesk software inventory and packages available, and that can be a good start point for license management. In this view it particularly shows the packages available by day and has product-specific information including license types. And there’s also information on host and operating system to get a quick understanding of what software is available, where it’s being run, and how often.

[21:59] So just as a quick case study, here’s an engineering firm with no enterprise-wide view of their license usage. And as a result they had no idea what types of licenses were being used. This particular organization had a mix of node-locked licenses for workstations as well as floating licenses that could be checked out over the network. As it turns out, once they did some analysis they found that there were instances where a floating license was being checked out on a workstation that already had a node-locked license. And so they were able, with some planning and controls, to better manage their licensing costs based on that.

[22:31] So beyond the simple inventory types of reports it’s always of interest to see what’s being used. And these are the types of easily generated reports that can summarize usage. In this instance it’s shown by month. But note that the packages are broken down into features or the individual modules that they contain, and this information of mapping modules to features gives important insight that may not otherwise be easily available. Just by looking at what packages are being checked out, by understanding what those packages are comprised of, it gets to the point where you can get a better understanding of the individual features that are being used most actively.

[23:19] So obviously the raw module features are shown here as well. Sometimes those are not spelled out if you don’t have something that maps those features directly. So data can also be exported and graphed in Excel in a number of different ways. There are any number of ways to graph things these days, but this is a simple bar graph that just shows the top ten Autodesk features by hours of usage. And this actually tracks different versions of the same type of software, for instance Building Design Suite or AutoCAD. But you can either show the different versions separately or you could show the versions combined to show what features are being used the most.

[24:10] So as mentioned there are a number of different ways to display data. One of them that we frequently use at Open iT is actually called Microsoft Power BI, it’s their business intelligence tool from Microsoft, and it provides seamless reporting. And with an interface it can be packaged together with Open iT software for efficient creation of presentation-quality, management-quality types of graphics. So shown here is just a dashboard that summarizes distinct users by module and package, followed by a breakdown of the daily distinct users by module, the graph at the bottom there. So the data can also be easily sliced by weekdays versus weekends, as you can see over on the right side there, you can select the periods and different slicers for how that data will be displayed.

[24:58] So unlike the last dashboard, this is quite similar but it focuses on the number of users. And in a standard license analysis this dashboard looks more toward licenses available and licenses in use. And again it’s broken down by module and percent of usage of the available licenses on a nice speedometer-type graph there. And it also shows daily patterns or long-term patterns. In this instance the graph at the bottom shows a longer-term pattern but you can still see the weekday and weekend usage, and that’s graphed as a function of the total number of licenses available as well as a line that shows the maximum that are ever in use. So it’s pretty easy to see right here that we’re over-licensed a bit for this particular package.

[25:45] So another use of these types of business intelligence tools is to graph things by geographical location, or by other organizational features like department or by country. And this can relate, if you’ve got a high volume of individuals in a given area using a given software suite, understanding that usage can show their effect on the overall licensing. If they’re using a lot of licenses in a particular location, sometimes it’s possible to identify wasteful usage patterns simply by seeing multiple licenses checked out by the same user in a given area. So you can identify those types of wasteful usage patterns as well.

[26:34] So as noted previously under the discussion of enterprise agreements, Autodesk offers the option of using their software based on special metering and payment that’s known as Token Flex. And with Token Flex the quantity of tokens is purchased and then all the software usage from Autodesk is paid for using those tokens, and they’re automatically deducted from what amounts to a sort of token bank account. And different applications have different costs for usage. And as a result, understanding the cost implications of the Token Flex system is not necessarily straightforward if you try and do long-term planning. But if you’ve got historical usage costs, historical usage patterns, then the usage costs under Token Flex can be simulated into a hypothetical situation for planning purposes. So in this instance the users are rated by their top users by elapsed time of use, as well as by the number of concurrent Autodesk licenses in use, but also the third pattern shows a projection of the cost of usage and how it would relate into tokens. So this can be very useful for planning if there’s a chance that you’re changing to Token Flex licensing.

[27:51] And here’s another interesting case study. This time it’s an auto manufacturer. They were interested in or looking at the possibility of moving to a Token Flex as an enterprise licensing option. But managers were very nervous about how to make an informed decision on how many tokens to purchase. And there are some implications there about tokens having a limited lifespan, having to purchase tokens in bulk packages. So getting the correct purchase right away for a year is somewhat important so that you’re not either over-purchasing for that year or having to purchase a bulk quantity of licenses in the middle of the year and having part of those additional licensing tokens with that licensing plan expire before they’re used. So with the understanding of past use we were able to model their past usage into token costs, and they were actually able to move forward with evaluation of the benefits of the Token Flex agreement versus their other options.

[29:03] So having reports available to accomplish effective usage rights management is of course also an important consideration in license management of software. And reports which show things like days since last used for various users can be effective in determining whether the usage rights still are really required for a given user and a given software. And it’s possible to adjust access lists from time to time, and that could be really important especially if you’ve got named user licenses where a license has been assigned for exclusive use by a given person and that maybe needs to be reviewed from time to time, whether they still need that exclusive use of a license or not. And also done consistently over time it reduces the number of users that could potentially be a liability during a software audit. And by adding information about elapsed time of usage over a set interval, as well as understanding the days since last used, it provides insight into a user’s profile for determining their access rights.

[30:14] So here’s data actually for an asset reliability management firm, and we generated and included some sample reports based on the actual application usage of their Autodesk licensing for purposes of analyzing their current usage and helping with their IT initiatives including software cost optimization. And it’s just a couple of samples of how Open iT can review data for an environment in our license manager. Note here that if you go back and trace the dates, what’s interesting here is that it’s actually after 6:00 PM on a Monday and there aren’t any users except for this Mr. Gibson here, who’s had a couple of AutoCAD licenses, two of them actually, checked out since Friday night. So whether he was using these actually over the weekend is somewhat interesting, and it may be an indication of wasteful usage of licenses.

[31:07] So going a little deeper into data acquired over a two-week period of time shows which software is in highest demand. So what we can see here is AutoCAD 2014 and AutoCAD 2015 are not really being all that heavily utilized but some of the newer packages are seeing 100% utilization. And similarly, product design suites have not been utilized heavily overall but a few of the plant design suites are seeing very heavy usage. And this is the sort of information that makes it possible, that you really need to know this sort of information, to move away from unused software and maybe transition those spend dollars to beef up some of the more heavily used items. And it’s really not possible to understand this without some sort of usage metering. So this also just to note, it covers a relatively short period of time, and it’s usually necessary to take a little bit of a longer-term perspective to make final decisions. But it is a good indication of how you can understand what’s being used most and what’s not being used much at all.

[32:19] And so by looking in this instance at one of the AutoCAD packages’ use on a timeline, it can be seen that full license utilization is happening not just on a limited basis but it’s happening almost every day of every workweek. So what we can see is that in addition to what we knew before, that that particular AutoCAD package was being used extensively, we can see that there may actually be a need for additional licenses based on understanding the weekly usage patterns here.

[32:51] So this is different, similar but for the actual Product Design Suite Premium. And this timeline shows that over a two-week period, similar to the previous one, there’s actually some relatively light usage. So in the bigger picture, although at the initial parts of it it looks like there’s very heavy utilization of it, that didn’t last for very long. And so it’s important to understand, if you’re seeing 100% utilization over a given period of time, understanding how frequently that 100% utilization is actually occurring. So these types of graphs are very helpful with understanding that, and in this instance you really would want to take a longer-term look at whether there were additional needs for this particular Product Design Suite.

[33:48] And in understanding the utilization of licenses it’s possible to determine how efficiently the number of licenses are being used. And that’s where these types of, what we’re showing here is a license histogram, can be quite useful. So this histogram shows the amount of time that various quantities of licenses were in use. And what’s notable here is the relatively high amount of time that all or nearly all of the licenses are being used, whereas the middle range, the 20s, 30s, and 40s leading up to that, aren’t used as much of the time. Which indicates that as we had seen in the graph with nearly full utilization almost every day of the week, we can see that either very few of the licenses are checked out or almost all of the licenses are checked out. So it’s important to understand the utilization efficiency of the licenses that are available.

[34:43] So by contrast this is a histogram for the other application suite, Design Premium, and what we can see here is that most of the total usage is covered by a relatively small number of licenses. And since the histogram is relatively flat above say the number 13, it’s indicative that the number of licenses that are accounting for most of the usage are below 13. And there may be the possibility for recognizing some savings by reducing the number of licenses here, if you can get a handle on the total amount of time that some of those higher quantities of licenses are being used.

[35:18] So this is just another, it’s a color-based graphical representation of the maximum number of licenses in use, and in this instance it’s based on days of the week and the 24 hours of the day going horizontally. But the bright colors, yellows, oranges, reds indicate high usage and it’s commonly referred to for that reason as a heat map. It’s very easy to quickly identify the specific hours of days or days of the week that are busiest. And notable here, similar to what we had seen in the bar graph previously, pretty much every weekday during business hours all of the licenses are maxed out at the total number of 72. And we can also see here that after hours and on weekends there are licenses that are not used, the number drops dramatically. And so people are actually pretty consistently checking licenses back in when they’re not using them. But even if you look at the after hours or on weekends, Saturday and Sunday still have 11 licenses constantly in use. And so it’s somewhat doubtful that 11 or 12 licenses really are constantly in use on the weekends. So there probably are some people who are kind of camping out on those licenses permanently. And it may be possible to reduce the number of licenses needed. If those 11 licenses are constantly checked out and not used during the peak periods then that 72-license maximum usage may not be accurate, some of those licenses may just be sitting open and checked out but not used.

[37:01] So this is another heat map that covers the entire month of July. Again we could see that the pattern is pretty much as expected, with the usage of licenses falling off dramatically over the 4th of July time period there, and on some of the weekends as well and after hours. But we could see here that a significant number of licenses are never checked in after hours or on weekends. Although it looks like we got down to nearly complete check-in of licenses over the holiday weekend, there may be a little bit of opportunity here for reduction of licenses.

[37:38] So in addition to reviewing historical reports and presentations it’s also useful to have the ability to set up some dashboards that actually alert in real time based on current information. And this kind of moves license understanding and management into a proactive dimension. So actually Open iT provides alerting for high quantities of license usage or high percentage of license usage when you’re approaching all of those licenses being checked out, as well as long checkout of licenses. For instance, if you’ve got someone that’s checked out a license for several days, or if people are consuming multiple licenses of the same license at the same time, these are going to allow for intervention, allow for more efficient usage of licenses, and actually prevent usage crises when we’re getting close to the point where all of the licenses are checked out and people are actively looking for licenses to do work with.

[38:43] So with the ability to set up a variety of standard alerts like license utilization approaching 100%, it’s possible to reduce the number of denials that result when the maximum license checkout is reached. And of course we call the people who check out more than one license, license hogs. And so you can set alarms for if someone’s got more than a certain number of licenses, say more than five licenses of a given software checked out at the same time. And there are also alerts for things like license servers being down, license expiration, and things like that.

[39:19] So in summary, with Autodesk’s recent changes they require that the licensing pros and cons are carefully evaluated. And it becomes possible to weigh the flexibility of cloud and subscription options with the long-term savings that have been traditionally available with perpetual licenses, and how important it is to maintain the license agreements for perpetuals to maintain that investment. And as well, just finding the right combination, if you’ve got perpetual licenses and need to add additional licenses, adding some of the newer options into that to find a combination that works best for any given company in their particular situation. So Open iT also has a strong history of generating savings and return on investment through license management, especially in situations where change was forced on an organization by external circumstances. So that can be business going up or going down, and being able to understand how usage is changing and the licensing needs to change with that. Or just navigating the Autodesk changes, the changes to what’s available most recently. And not understanding that can result in wasted resources and inefficient license use. And trying to make the best decisions for how to set up new licensing without understanding traditional usage patterns and options available is going to be very difficult.

[41:00] So to kind of wrap up here, there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle and it’s important to understand what to focus on and how to make the analytics in order to understand license usage and achieve optimal license positioning, as well as being able to effectively negotiate the new licenses when those opportunities arise. So that’s the end of the presentation. At this point I’d like to thank everybody, and if anyone has any questions we’d be more than happy to go over them with you as best we can.

[41:33] Lynn: Thanks Carl. We’ve got a few good questions here. This first one is interesting because I’m sure you can come up with a really quick answer for it. But this one is geared toward, do you know how Autodesk defines value of the subscription model for an organization that has a decentralized asset management model? So therefore the ability to harvest unused assets is literally non-existent. How does Autodesk address that issue? I know from your tool perspective how you’d address it, but how does Autodesk sell into those environments?

[42:13] Carl: So I may have missed the first part, is that related to the subscription and cloud offerings? Okay, yes. How do they say that this is a valuable tool for them and a valuable licensing model for them to use when they have no way of detecting how many they really need because there’s no centralized asset management? Yeah, I think that in order to do that I’m not sure that Autodesk is really going to help people with that. So I’m not sure that I could really answer for Autodesk on that particular topic. Understanding the usage and the cloud subscriptions and workstation subscriptions as well as the floating licenses, and understanding all of that together, of course is going to be very important. They don’t necessarily have a centralized system to do that. So you really need to have something in order to understand all of those various aspects. If you’ve got floating licenses as well as node-locked licenses you’re going to have to implement some sort of your own tool to do that, and many times that might involve actually putting an agent on a number of desktop computers in order to understand what’s going on there. So if they aren’t checking out floating licenses there’s no way to track what they’re doing, and that’s why we’ve come up with some of our solutions, is to help people with that particular situation. Now if you’ve got renewals of cloud or subscription types of setups on a regular basis without understanding that, it’s going to be very difficult admittedly. And I don’t think that Autodesk is necessarily going to help a lot with understanding your individual organization’s usage with that.

[44:07] Lynn: Okay, sure. Helps much because they’re probably not going to help you too much with that. I mean to me they would look at that as an opportunity to sell more product potentially.

[44:14] Carl: Yeah, I mean they want to be flexible and there is some flexibility in those cloud offerings because if you buy something you’re not stuck with it forever. So you’re not purchasing those high-dollar assets as a permanent asset. So if you do determine that you need to change then it’s much easier to do. Determining a basis for coming up with that needed change is another issue.

[44:46] Lynn: Okay, in moving from a perpetual model to a subscription, or moving from what they currently have to any kind of cloud or subscription-based license, what do you see in working with your customers as some of the biggest things that they miss or they haven’t considered that you can help them out with?

[45:01] Carl: Yeah, so there are a few things in there. I think I had a couple of our best case studies in there. One of them certainly is if you’ve got node-locked licenses, that was one of our big success stories really. I mean it doesn’t happen a lot but if you do have node-locked licenses as well as floating licenses, understanding the usage of that. Or if you’ve got older software that’s being underutilized, and this goes back to some of our other reports and examples, if you can determine which types of software are being heavily utilized, or if you’ve got packages that contain given features or modules that, it looks like this particular module is being checked out just to use a particular feature of it, you can tell if all the modules with a particular feature seem to be heavily utilized. Then you may be able to change away from the packages that contain things that you don’t need and maybe move toward a lower-cost license that has maybe fewer things but more of what you’re using the most. So understanding the usage from that standpoint is pretty important, as well as just understanding the types of licenses that you’ve got and how those are being utilized and whether they’re being utilized efficiently. And of course I don’t really want to go back into the whole understanding long checkouts and how often you’re maxing out your total licenses checked out, but certainly those factored in as well.

[46:43] Lynn: Yeah, there were a lot of good graphics in the presentation as far as reporting capabilities, which was fantastic, things that people should be looking for. Another question that someone had is, can Open iT check cloud usage of Autodesk products natively?

[46:52] Carl: So the only way to check the use of cloud stuff is to actually have an agent on a computer and tell what’s going on with the web browser activity from there. So there are some limitations to that as well, because you can set it up maybe to check with one type of browser but there are numerous types of browsers that need to be followed. And so that’s a little bit of a slippery problem. It’s not impossible to do it and there are also some ways to do it just by understanding the network traffic and understanding when some of that is going on. That’s also not very easy to do. So there are a few things that can be done to try to get a better handle on what’s going on with cloud usage, but it’s not necessarily a 100% solution just because. And that may be, we may have growing capability with that over time, it’s something that we’re still trying to grow our capability and understanding in to come up with good solutions for it that will help people. Right now there are certainly some limitations on it.

[48:06] Lynn: Okay. Based on your experience, what levels of savings, when you’re walking into a customer for the first time and they are going to implement the solution, what types of savings and what level of savings are typical for companies? And of course I know this is dependent on the size of the organization but in general, can you give us any statistics as far as when they start to meter Autodesk applications?

[48:29] Carl: Yes, so we really go back to, in many instances in trying to come up with an average value, we really go back to some of the IT consulting organizations to try to come up with those statistics. We don’t necessarily aren’t necessarily able to track those accurately. So I kind of go back to the Gartner study that shows that most people are showing about a 30% reduction in costs and that they expect that’ll average out over the next two to three years as an average 30% savings, or actually average 30% reduction in total software spend, just as a result of implementation of tools to help make more efficient use of licenses. So again obviously it varies a lot, we’ve got companies who have saved much more than 30%, we’ve got companies that have saved less than that certainly, and it depends on their efficiency, some of their internal dynamics as well, and their ability to make changes or willingness sometimes to make changes based on the information that they receive. But we throw out 30% as a pretty good average quantity.

[49:40] Lynn: Okay. In looking at your tool itself, how long typically, and again this is objective, does it take to implement the tool?

[49:48] Carl: The implementation of our tool really can happen very very quickly. Sometimes the configuration can happen in a day or so, sometimes it takes a little bit of tweaking to get everything working right, and it varies from environment to environment. But really the initial setup for our solution is very quick, usually happens in about one day, can really only take a few hours. I mean I’ve seen them set up in just a few hours and get most of the stuff working. Sometimes a few tweaks over the days to get some things that maybe weren’t recognized on the initial installation, but it’s quick.

[50:34] Lynn: Okay. Other than that fast implementation timeframe, there are a number of questions here that are asking a similar question as to what do you see, if someone was to walk into their boss and say I think we need to implement a tool to monitor and meter our usage, what would you tell them would be their checklist of savings and benefits?

[51:07] Carl: I mean I’ve gone through a lot of that, but really there are, it’s a multi-dimensional question that we didn’t get into fully in this particular presentation. But there are, understanding of license usage, understanding sometimes workflow patterns, what software is being used by the people who are achieving work most effectively. The obvious answer is that you understand what licenses are being used and which ones aren’t, and you get right-sized for your licensing. The audit question certainly comes up quite frequently, if people are going into situations where they’re out of compliance and may not realize it, that’s a very important and high-value benefit as well.

[52:01] Lynn: Okay, we’re looking at that, and I think the rest they can pull out of the slide presentation itself because you had a lot of different slides there with a lot of good information and they can probably interpret that into their own savings report. So I think we’ve gotten through most of the questions. There are a couple of them here that are very detailed and I think they would be better served via email, so I’ll hold those for you Carl to look at afterwards. So I think at this point I want to wrap things up. I want to thank everyone for participating in today’s webinar, especially Carl, our speaker. And like I said, all remaining questions, or if you have additional questions, you can address them to Carl at his email here, you can send them to ITAM and we will forward them along, or if you’ve typed them into the chat window obviously he will get those. The recording will be made available of this event probably early next week on the ITAM website for those that are ITAM members. Remember also Open iT will be reaching out to you if you’re interested in a PDF copy of the presentation because there’s a lot of great information on there. And again thank you everyone and this concludes today’s presentation. Thank you all for participating. Bye now.