Elimine a complexidade: Otimize as licenças da Siemens em ambientes híbridos

[0:03] Mae: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to one and all. Welcome to Open iT’s webinar entitled Untangle the Complexity: Optimize Siemens Licenses Across Hybrid Environments. My name is Mae and I will be your host for today.

[0:20] In the next 30 minutes, our speaker will tackle the essentials of managing Siemens licenses and show you how to take control of your Siemens licensing across hybrid setups. Specifically, we will focus on where you might be overspending and some ways to fix it.

[0:36] Learn how to manage subscription, token, and concurrent licenses without losing track and understand how other teams like yours are making Siemens licensing work smarter for them. So, if you’re juggling different models across hybrid environments or just trying to get clearer visibility into what you’re using and what it’s costing you, this session is for you.

[0:56] Before we get started, let me encourage everyone to ask questions. Just drop them in the Q&A section at the top panel of your screen and our speaker will address them during the Q&A session. If we don’t have the opportunity to answer all the questions or if there are any questions that need further investigation, rest assured that we will send it to Paul and we will reach out via email or through LinkedIn to answer those inquiries.

[1:25] Without further ado, let’s welcome our speaker, Open iT sales manager for industrial manufacturing, Paul Empream.

[1:34] Paul: Thank you, Mae. Okay, thank you. Welcome to my webinar on navigating the challenges of Siemens software licensing in a modern hybrid licensing environment. So in this presentation we’re going to take a look at Siemens license strategy, its transition over the last few years, and we’ll dig into the new world of tokens, subscriptions, and of course concurrent licenses, covering how license costs add up really fast when usage goes unmonitored.

[2:05] Identifying areas where Siemens software licenses are being consistently underutilized, misallocated, or mostly left idle. I’ll show you how to dig into usage patterns, uncover cost drivers, and take corrective action before renewal season creeps up on us, as it often does.

[2:17] But firstly, let me introduce myself. So, I’m Paul Empingham. I started my career a long time ago now as a mechanical design engineer for a defense contractor and I was using Pro-Engineer actually straight out of university. My career’s touched on all aspects of industrial manufacturing industries. I’ve worked for the Siemens, the vendor we’re talking about here. I’ve run engineering systems departments and teams at global companies. And I’ve worked in consulting to bring together thought leaders across the industry. And here you can see me sat trying to host a session between many of the VPs and presidents of some of the biggest PLM companies.

[3:06] But for the last six years, I’ve been helping companies like yours optimize their engineering licenses. And it’s been a pleasure.

[3:11] So, Open iT. Open iT is a key component of your IT asset management strategy. We’re a niche provider of technical and engineering applications. We track, consolidate the data and offer you statistical analysis under a single and flexible reporting interface, providing the complete information required for optimizing strategy and renewal decisions. We go several steps further and offer our customers an active license management with automated harvesting of inactive licenses to really maximize the license ratios. We serve applications from all the key engineering vendors monitored and optimized in our system all under one roof. You can see some of them mentioned here but we actually cover thousands of different software products.

[4:12] How do we pay for application usage? Well, engineering software seems to be leading the charge in developing new and innovative license models.

[4:26] So perpetual with maintenance is rapidly being replaced by subscription or time-based or consumption-based or as we see with Siemens it’s kind of a hybrid environment of many of these. Software is being delivered in new ways. Do you purchase it as a SaaS solution or are you still installing it on-premises in your environment? Do you pay for access even if you’re not using it? Are tokens working for us as customers or are they stacked heavily in the favor of vendors, which we know a lot of our customers are saying? There are so many questions these days for engineering systems managers and the software procurement teams.

[5:15] Siemens. So Siemens is a leading provider of technical software tools with an ever-expanding portfolio, which is why you’re here watching this webinar. Whether you’re using a mid-range CAD like Solid Edge or high-end design tools such as Siemens NX or you’re supporting the R&D or manufacturing process through many of the fantastic simulation or tooling, machining, plant design, the list of all these fantastic products goes on. Recent license changes have added a layer of complexity to licensing that needs to be addressed.

[5:52] Now when I look at this slide, I fondly remember the Siemens swoosh graphic and I’m sure many of you will do too, where we look at Teamcenter kind of as a backbone, the upfront design tools, a lot of the kind of simulation manufacturing, but the portfolio has grown substantially more than that. Siemens has repositioned their product ranges now to become the accelerator series and that’s really assisting companies in delivering their transformation across R&D and manufacturing, slightly different way of packaging things.

[6:28] But how did Siemens become the leader in software for industry? We can see in this fantastic graphic I’ve borrowed from Michael. Thank you Michael. That there’s been substantial acquisitions to enable such a complete portfolio from the days that it was a McDonald Douglas product. I joined when it was EDS and obviously things have come a long way since then. Key highlights really were the acquisition of SDRC with Ideas, Nastran, CD-Adapco, Mentor Graphics, the partnership with Bentley Systems which isn’t even mentioned on this slide actually, through to acquiring Mendix, Polarion, the portfolio is getting huge really. And then actually just last month the exciting news that Altair and Dotmatics are joining the fold as well.

[7:26] There’s a huge portfolio and I’m sure Siemens are trying to sell it to you at every stage.

[7:36] However, with all these acquisitions and all these kind of products in the product range comes complexity, and this is what we’re talking about. As customers adopted more tools from the portfolio, they discovered that they’re required to install additional license servers. So let’s say you took on Solid Edge or Polarion or Mentor Graphics, they were all required to install their own license servers.

[8:05] But hold on, forgive me. I’m assuming that you’re actually familiar with licensing. And I know that some people attending probably won’t be. So, let me explain a little bit further. Siemens uses Flexera’s FlexNet license platform or FlexLM as it’s known and it’s used to manage user enablement as a system. It provides authentication for license features and bundles to be checked in and checked out throughout the day through a use of kind of pool of purchased licenses.

[8:32] So if we look up in this top right hand corner, we can see a user workstation. Let’s say they’ve got Siemens NX and Teamcenter. So they fire up the applications. They load up a module. A request goes across the network to the license server. The license server checks the license file that it actually has the entitlement. It checks the pool of licenses to see whether there’s one available and it pushes back down a yes, which allows a license to be checked out. And this happens on and off throughout the day for all these different modules that are being used.

[9:10] Managing this pool of licenses meant companies could use the 2/3 ratio rule which I hope you’ve all heard of or you know if you’re managing licenses I’m sure you’re working on. So the 2/3 rule generally means if you’ve got 300 users you would only need about 200 licenses and that’s due to the other third or the 100 engineers not actually using the system at that particular time. So maybe they’re in meetings, maybe they’re traveling, on vacation, just tasked with different activities.

[9:49] FlexNet supports concurrent license use as we see in NX and Solid Edge, but it also supports named user and consumption-based licenses as we see in Teamcenter.

[9:58] Now to solve the challenges of licensing for a large portfolio, Siemens has embarked on a project for delivering commonality. The result is a move to the SALT license server which is still based on this FlexLM technology we see up here. Siemens Advanced Licensing Technology. So it’s intended to provide a more efficient and future-proof and easier to manage, apparently, licensing experience for Siemens software users. So it reduces the complexity on the server side whilst maintaining compatibility with many of the existing license systems.

[10:42] Now from my point of view it’s going to be interesting to see how the products from the Altair acquisition are going to be integrated as Altair has a mature token-based license mechanism not based on FlexLM. But let me highlight, if you do use Altair currently and their fantastic tool set, we do fully support their license mechanism and we help companies optimize those licenses. So if you do use it and you want to do some pre-work before the consolidation with the Siemens tools, get in touch.

[11:15] So one risk I can see with this SALT license mechanism is possibly the changing of the licenses far more often than you would have done beforehand. Obviously we’re all used to changing a license file here and there. But if you’re having to change it for any license changes for EDA, or some of the other different portfolio products, we all know how nerve-wracking it is when you’re changing a license file across multiple global triad server arrangements and you’re hitting that reread button. It’s kept me up at night sometimes.

[12:00] In June 2024, Siemens announced an advanced notice of price increases due to hit October 2024. I’m sure you read this letter with some trepidation. I hope you’ve all had it. There’s no hiding it. Siemens has announced a carrot and stick approach to move as many customers away from perpetual licenses and away from on-premises software too.

[12:26] A 15% price increase is a heavy, heavy price to pay just to try and maintain your current ways of working. I know we expect some increases but 15% does seem particularly hard, especially when we can see the costs and the increases across the rest of the mechanisms.

[12:48] So, I suspect many of you are taking the opportunity to convert to what’s been offered, a bit of a carrot, I guess, the three-year hybrid SaaS agreement that sits at this level. What did you do or what are you doing? I guess to be honest, most of our customers or most customers from Siemens should have been planning for this for some time. You know, Perpetual has been mooted as the end of it for some time, but it’s fair to say this took some enterprise customers by surprise. Let’s face it, Perpetual’s dead. Long live subscription-based licensing.

[13:32] Now, if you bought NX in the past 15 years, it’s likely that you’ve been using a prepackaged kind of bundle of software known as a MAC license. You’re probably familiar with the terms of MAC 1 we see on screen. So MAC 1 Designer, maybe a MAC 2 Product Design, maybe MAC 3 Industrial Designer, then there’s a whole host of add-on purchase modules that were used and consumed in addition to these bundles, electrical routing, geometric tolerancing, you know, the list goes on.

[14:09] Now, Siemens has for some time now offered a token license pool for Simcenter, for NX and for Solid Edge products, and they call this value-based licensing. For Siemens NX, it has added tokenization now up to well over 100 add-on modules, which is pretty impressive when you think about it.

[14:31] Tokens. So, let’s just discuss what we see on screen here. So let’s say we’ve got five users all of them happily consuming a MAC 1 base bundle license. We see that at 9:30 a user starts using human modeling which consumes 26 tokens. Yeah, we see kind of a list of token values over here. And then user number two starts using Realized Shape to do some nice visualization stuff. And we can see the token pool has decreased in size. User one checks back in, the token pool’s a lot larger. Yeah. And we can see that routing is taken out. So the key message here is that these licenses keep going in and out throughout the day.

[15:13] Now you need to consider the number of users accessing the pool and the daily use type of these NX products versus what we call an occasional use NX product. So tokens are best used for occasional use. You can see human modeling, routing, these aren’t necessarily used all the time but they are at certain points in a particular project. Tokens are best used for occasional use. So if you have a product that you rely on daily, it may be better as a floating add-on. The token pools are most cost effective when there’s a wide variety of NX applications needed. So, in general, if four or more add-ons are needed, then token-based licensing is probably an attractive option for you. And the best thing is you can mix tokens and floating add-ons to give you kind of a really good flexibility in your license pool.

[16:16] Personally, I think tokens are a great addition to Siemens’ license portfolio. We know several customers who are using them, but equally, we know many that aren’t. And that’s because many enterprise customers have their own custom license bundles. They don’t use MAC 1, MAC 2, MAC 3 and that makes it very complicated for them to understand how to join this kind of tokenized value-based licensing. It just clouds the benefits for them. So this is where Siemens customers should work with us and LicenseAnalyzer™ to run the analysis of the license features used across those bundles just to measure the ROI for token license packs.

[16:56] The reality is we’re entering a world, a hybrid license environment world, where you need to manage licenses across at least three different mechanisms. It’s certainly not just concurrent licenses in a pool anymore.

[17:16] Trying to keep a single view across these mechanisms per user, per department or per company is going to be incredibly difficult. Certainly more difficult if you don’t have the right tools for this analysis. So on screen we see here named user. So Teamcenter obviously we have an author and a consumer license. Polarion as well had a separate system which is being folded into the SALT system. Then we have concurrent licenses which sit in a pool that might be subscription-based. So there we have NX, we have Solid Edge, Siemens EDA and many other of the different products as well. Teamcenter add-ons, hopefully you’re aware that some of the add-ons are ratio based. So when you bought Teamcenter and then you added a product like manufacturing, planning, classification, reporting, many of those are ratio-based add-ons that are concurrent licenses and there’s definitely some opportunities there for you to negotiate.

[18:24] Bottom left we talk about token licenses. We’ve just spoken about that. Interestingly tokens are now used across NX, Solid Edge, Simcenter and, I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but Design Center has been announced and Design Center is a really interesting product. It allows you to flow tokens between NX and Solid Edge from the same license pack. So that’s good because it means that some simplistic models you might be able to do in Solid Edge and some more complex geometry and the add-on modules you would do in NX, you know, with potentially different cost engineers.

[19:05] So yeah, I really feel that Siemens are kind of thinking ahead with this. We then have consumption-based licensing. Now, I’m not sure how many people know this, but Teamcenter has an occasional user license which sits in addition to Teamcenter Author and Consumer and it’s a fully functional author. But it’s restricted to 5 days and 20 hours. Now over the years it hasn’t been advertised by Siemens particularly and it’s been incredibly difficult for customers to measure and to analyze who should actually receive these and so it’s just become too hard to manage, which is why most customers don’t use this.

[19:56] Okay, LicenseAnalyzer™. So taking all that in, now let’s look at how we can make sense of all the license information and look for opportunities where we can optimize. So LicenseAnalyzer™ is our niche SAM tool for capturing license usage, supporting thousands of different software programs. As I mentioned previously, let’s talk about how licensing works then within our software. We have a number of licenses that we’ve purchased which is kind of the green and the gray line at the top. The blue line then shows this FlexNet server the check-in and checkout traffic and status over time, where we see how many licenses are in use at any one time. We can do this for any license feature or bundle or collection.

[20:35] We can see that at one point in this time the customer received a number of denials. So they were hitting this kind of gray line at the top. So they bought more licenses, installed them and then it happened again. They got more denials. So, they bought more licenses and ever since they’ve been incredibly happy because they haven’t had any more denials, but visually we can immediately see that they’re not optimized for licensing because we’ve got a substantial number, probably the number they bought, they’re just not used.

[21:07] LicenseAnalyzer™ has three levels within our functionality. So, level one, and we’re looking at this blue line, which is the server checkouts.

[21:19] Level two, we deploy an agent and this tracks what we call the true active usage of an application, taking into account how much time a user is actually active on the Siemens software, whether it’s NX, Solid Edge or so on. We look at the focus, so rather than Excel, email, meetings, websites, rather than doing everything else, we’re looking at the actual time people are in the software using it in earnest.

[21:55] Level three then is an active harvesting mechanism and that allows us to act on that information we find here. The true active usage. It allows us to set rules on when sessions are paused and when licenses can be returned to the server pool for reuse by other engineers.

[22:15] So once we’ve implemented level one, we’ll know the license amounts and the usage levels. Once we’ve implemented level two, we’ll be able to understand what usage would look like if no one had any idle time. And once we start up level three, this active harvesting, we see that the concurrent usage now goes down until it roughly matches the true active usage level, allowing us to decrease the amount of licenses we actually need, sometimes quite drastically.

[22:49] And let’s have a look at that. So we capture license usage information from license servers, users’ machines, from vendors, cloud portals. We pass that information. We validate it against duplicates and we store it in our database. That’s the easy bit. Now let’s look at ways in which our customers can access and report on this data. So what can Open iT offer in its embedded interface platform?

[23:21] Once you input the link into your browser, so we can do web-based, you’ll be able to get real-time usage, historical reporting capabilities and alerts which you can use in order to administer your licensing environment. But first and foremost, Open iT will show you what’s going on in your system right now, right in the environment, meaning which applications you have, which ones are being used at the moment, who’s using them, when were they started, and even if the license is borrowed. So, it’s a great picture for your team to understand who’s using which licenses. Great way of locating key users as well.

[24:03] I would say that many of our customers, probably most of our customers, actually use the Power BI interface, with reports and widgets used to create the dashboard that they want. So the metrics that they need, the KPIs and so on that’s more interesting for them. It’s one of the quickest ways to visually investigate all the data that sits in our database. And it’s just a great enabler for us to kind of cut that information in different ways.

[24:31] Here you can see the interactive nature of the dashboard to filter and narrow down the view to the particular licenses. So you can click on different aspects within Power BI and we can see that the reports and the charts change as you go through. So filters on the left hand side filter down the information. I’ve seen some people with reports they’re actually filtering on MAC bundles, MAC 1, 2, 3, which then gives the different list of users as well. So really, really nice interactive way of validating this kind of historical data.

[25:08] Presented in a different way is a series of structured summary reports for historical data. Here we see a top level view over a defined period of time on the performance of our license features. It’s in these reports we would see entries for NX and Teamcenter. The base data can be presented in many different charts and tables helping build a visual picture of usage which is very difficult to gain from lines on spreadsheets. We see here the MAC 1 licenses are underutilized. There’s quite a big difference between the blue and the red line and there’s actually no growth indicated with the blue checkouts.

[25:53] Building the usage picture helps to understand your current license position for department growth or whether you can share some of these unused licenses with other parts of your company. Possibly you would look to renegotiate with your vendor and target a trade-in for some of these unused licenses. Or ultimately if you’re on subscription, which they’re trying to push everybody onto, maybe you just stop paying those subscriptions.

[26:17] Now besides some of those historical reports, let’s get to the ones that I really like. Open iT can offer you the ability to generate license efficiency reports. And I have to say this is my favorite report to show to senior leaders or all stakeholders to be honest. This is for you to better understand how many licenses you actually need. So in this case we have 55 MAC 1 licenses which were purchased. But how well are we using them? Well, this graph shows that we’ve only ever used 41. So, there’s 14 licenses that have never been used at all over this period.

[26:52] Also, we see that if we would like to reach an efficiency of 99%, you don’t mind having a couple of denials here and there. We don’t need 55 licenses at all. We could actually be fine with around 24, maybe a few more just to be a bit safe. So, this helps you understand exactly what you need in your licensing environment.

[27:14] Another really useful report is the heat map. We can display either maximum in use or average in use. And this is key to understand user behavior as well. Now, having used these heat maps across my departments in the past, I can probably tell you that on a Wednesday at 5:00, there’s probably a couple of design check-ins. And on a Friday, maybe this is people just want to go home for the weekend. That’s probably when users have to check some data in, start within a workflow.

[27:42] Also, on a Thursday morning, I suspect around 9:00 a.m. there’s a bit of a design review meeting. Everybody goes in, everybody talks about what needs to be done. The engineering director bangs his fist on the table, says get back to work. And then we see these kind of peak flows. And it’s important to look at these heat maps and see how we can redistribute behavior over the week because that’s a key aspect of us managing these licenses. We can see there’s no denials here, but actually a few denials aren’t too bad. It just means that you’re really keeping a good efficiency on your licenses.

[28:20] Understanding usage patterns such as days since last used could inform you on whether license features are good candidates for the NX token licensing pool. I’ve often been in this position. You know, look, somebody hasn’t used it for 40 days. You know, you ask the question and you find out that you left, but you haven’t had that notification. So, I’ll say to you that quite often our reports throw up more questions than they do actually answer. The ultimate aim is to plug in your numbers and see where these opportunities could be. Remember on average roughly a third of licenses never ever get used.

[29:01] So we have, just to remind you then, LicenseAnalyzer™ is made up of three parts. Level one which is runtime usage, the check-in checkout report, and that gives us all of this functionality with the live and the reporting and the periodic reports. Level two, this is our true active usage that we can meter and report, all based on the activity. And then we move up to managed usage where we act upon level two and we can get into some automated license harvesting. But we can also start to look at these kind of remix and what-if scenarios as well.

[29:45] I’ve shown you a few of the key dashboards, graphs and reports. However, there are so many different report types. I would definitely recommend a personalized demo for your company’s use case. Or if you are one of our customers watching, get in touch. Let’s look at how we can improve your Power BI dashboards. The new hybrid license environment is going to take more of the time to manage and optimize. So, make sure that you’ve got the correct solution to enable this.

[30:09] Partnering with Open iT brings many advantages. As part of this recognition, we’re fortunate to be trusted by most of the leading organizations across oil and gas, aerospace and defense, automotive, and the list of verticals goes on.

[30:25] So, thank you everybody. So, we’ve covered a lot and much of it quite quickly. I’m sorry. Siemens licensing is going through a transition. Many customers are negotiating renewals without the appropriate data to make their effective decision-making. I’d love to understand where you are on your license journey. So please ask any questions and let me thank you now for your time.

[30:54] Mae: Thank you Paul for your very insightful presentation. So we’ve got several questions here from our attendees and if you’re all set for the question and answer session, we can start now. All right. So here’s the first question that we received. Where are the quick wins for optimizing Siemens NX licenses?

[31:19] Paul: Quick wins. So I mean I’d say if we’re talking about Siemens, most of the companies are probably using MAC license bundles. Maybe what I’d start by doing is creating a report that shows all those assigned to MAC 2 bundles but have only ever used the functionality of MAC 1. So that’s kind of an easy report to do. So just show who’s never used the added bits of a MAC 2. Actually probably you might get better value doing it from MAC 3 to MAC 2. So, it’s just doing that quick analysis to show who shouldn’t be using that bundle and who could be using the one lower down.

[32:03] Or actually thinking about it, licenses unused for the last 6 months or 12 months. That’s a one-click report. You click on there, you see some license features that have never been used. Put those on a list to optimize. Now, if it’s Teamcenter, it’s going to say Info DBA. Well, that never gets utilized, but there’s a whole host of other features which will never be used and if you’re paying for them, stop paying for them or negotiate.

[32:32] If it’s Teamcenter, then I think I mentioned it earlier, look at the concurrent add-ons, Vis Base, Pro, Classification, Manufacturing, Planning. There’s definitely some good leverage there for negotiation with your vendors.

[32:50] Mae: Great. Thank you. So before we proceed to the next question, I would like to encourage our viewers to write their questions in the Q&A tab that is found on the upper corner of your screen. Okay, so we are entertaining questions. So here’s the second question. Paul, how do you track token licensing in LicenseAnalyzer™?

[33:17] Paul: Oh, did I miss that one? So tokens are listed in the LM Stat. So, in FlexLM, if you do an LM Stat, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, you get a listing out of all the licenses, you know, who’s using which license. So, it actually lists out the tokens that are in use. So, we collect this info. We kind of pull this constantly to get this on a regular basis. So, we can show who’s using what live. And then obviously that’s in our database so we can report on that historically. It’s really informative actually. Yeah. So join me for a demo and we can show you.

[34:03] Mae: Are there any more? Yes, we actually have another one. Can you simulate the cost to change to the token model?

[34:14] Paul: Can you simulate the cost for the tokens? Yeah. So, we can, if you share with us how much you’ve paid for those tokens in that token pack. Obviously there’s a token value associated with that. So I think as I just mentioned we can see who’s used which tokens where and when and we can see how long they use them for as well. So yeah we can model that out in a report, yeah it’s good.

[34:45] Mae: Great. And here’s another one. What is your experience with Siemens users moving to subscription licensing?

[34:57] Paul: I mean really when you look back at that kind of the letter that came out last year, you know, talking about the license changes, we’re probably at a midway planning point. You know, we’ve got several enterprise customers who will be on multi-year agreements. We’ve got others who are on an annual basis. So we’ve got customers who are looking at this quite carefully with all the data, doing their kind of scenario planning, putting the costs in. But customers are kind of accepting it. You know it was inevitable. Perpetual’s gone. When you look at every other kind of license type out there and some of the drastic things that are happening in business software like Broadcom with VMware and Microsoft, you know it was inevitable that it’s going to change.

[35:48] Now of course if you’ve got lots of users, if you’re an enterprise customer and you had a big maintenance bill, then your negotiation power is much higher and that’s where we’re kind of working with them just to highlight some of the best areas for probably trade-ins more than anything. Siemens, it’s always going to be tough. It depends whether you work through a VAR or not. Depends on the situation. But yeah, let me know your stories and your situation. It’s interesting. Thank you.

[36:20] Mae: Thank you, Paul. I think this is a follow-up question to a previous question that you already answered. It says, “But if you do not have tokens now, can you simulate how much it would cost to change to tokens?”

[36:37] Paul: Oh, I see. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, what we do is we look at, let’s say you’ve got add-ons at the moment, you know, and they have a cost. We can look at those add-ons and see how often you’ve used them to see whether it’d be better to switch or if you were to purchase something new whether tokens would be better. The difficulty for us is we can’t simulate something if you’re not using it at the moment. So there’s over 100 add-ons. You might be cherry-picking a few of those add-ons. I mean we have customers that come to us and say look we’re going to be charged a certain amount of money for these add-ons and we think we’re going to be using it like this, but that’s not something that we’ve got automated in the system, that’s more of a planning kind of exercise that we do for them.

[37:35] If there’s no data for us to act on around using those modules then it’s very difficult for us to have that report for you but we can certainly try and simulate it for you. We can certainly come up with some planning and put some costs against it. That’s what we do. We do have a great professional services team that kind of do those activities.

[38:02] Mae: Thank you Paul. And here’s another one. Hello, this is Adnan from GE Aerospace. First, we are really happy with your tool. Thank you. Second, please explain the idle usage and behavior. How to see that in Open iT. Thank you.

[38:20] Paul: Yeah. So idle usage, so we install an agent on the workstations and we know that’s controversial for many customers in certain countries. But actually we have many, many, many happy customers. So that agent just looks at the CPU, the IO usage. So it’s looking at the focus then of whether you’re using Teamcenter or Siemens, you know, something on screen. And that data is pushed back.

[38:57] And so you can set a threshold. So you could say, okay, 15 minutes of inactivity will warn the customer. Or 15 minutes of inactivity, we will pause their session and we will push the license back to the license pool. So that just, we’re really really optimizing the pool of licenses.

[39:23] I hope that answers your question because it’s all done on the workstation where it’s looking all the time and when it detects there’s a threshold of some kind, it then triggers that ability and then when the user comes back they might want to kind of unfreeze their session and off they go. So yeah, different companies have different ways. Some companies want to lose that license. And some companies want to kind of pause things for users to kind of keep going. But all in all, what it does is it trains the user to think more about licensing and efficient licensing because nobody wants to lose their licenses. So it starts this mentality within a company of people caring a bit more about the licenses and it stops people hogging licenses as well. So, but yeah, contact us for more information and to see it in practice.

[40:27] Mae: Thank you, Paul, for sharing your insights and answering those questions. So, those are all of our questions, but before we end this webinar, Paul, do you have any parting words for your viewers?

[40:40] Paul: No, just thank you so much for your time. It is a complex world out there and things are changing all the time. We’re here. If there’s any other subjects you’d like to cover, maybe go into a bit more depth in Siemens licensing, please just reach out and we’ll try and put a webinar together for you for everyone’s benefit. So, thank you.

[41:05] Mae: Thank you so much, Paul. That was really enriching. And we also thank all our attendees for joining our webinar today. A quick reminder again that this webinar is recorded and can be immediately replayed after this live stream, but we will also upload it on our website. We appreciate your attendance at this webinar. You may also view our latest blog, learn effective Siemens NX cost optimization and management on our website. You may scan the code on your screen or visit openit.com.

[41:35] Connect with one of our Open iT business solutions consultants for a free 30-minute consultation and get started with your software optimization journey. Get in touch with us through the details you see on the screen and follow Open iT, Inc. on social media. Once again, this is Mae, your host for today. Thank you and stay safe.