Transformar os dados brutos de utilização do Open iT em informações acionáveis

[2:50] Mae: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everyone. This is Open iT’s webinar entitled Transforming Open iT Raw Usage Data into Actionable Insights. My name is Mae and I will be your host for today. Together let’s learn to create reports and dashboards to monitor and analyze your software license usage, such as admin reports for overall software license consumption and compliance and costs, manager reports for team performance and budget comparison, and product management reports for portfolio consumption and usage patterns. Before we get started let me encourage everyone to ask questions, just drop them in the chat box 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 them to Sagi and we will reach out via email or through LinkedIn to answer those inquiries.

[3:52] As a solutions architect our speaker has one mission: to deliver results that add value to his clients. Highly experienced in customer relationship management, he has worked with high-profile clients from multiple verticals helping them reach their goals by maximizing their software investments. Let’s welcome Sagi Reuven.

[4:18] Sagi: Thank you very much Mae. So let me take you to an actionable report which helps you gain insight into your engineering license usage. Now I’m going to show you a few reports here dedicated to various questions that we usually have when operating the day-to-day operations, when procuring new licenses and so on. So as you know Open iT collects information from all different license servers in your organization and deposits them in various interfaces. One which I’ll focus on today is Power BI. You can use any BI tool, even Excel, because Open iT uses something called an OLAP Cube technology which is basically the industry standard for data analysis.

[5:10] So what do we get? First of all what’s going on in the system, how many licenses I have, how many are concurrently used, what is my overall utilization. You can create different dashboards to fit your needs, you can create different KPIs to fit your organization or manager requests. Now we use business intelligence tools to show the data because it allows us to gain more visibility into existing raw usage. So we can take this raw usage and aggregate it however we like, per location, per department, per company, and get those KPIs which are really hard to create based on the licensing types. If it’s a network concurrent license it might be hard to calculate, where Open iT can do that easily.

[6:25] So besides seeing the data, viewing max license usage, do I have enough licenses, do I need more licenses? Well we can take it up one step further and conduct different simulations, different what-if scenarios that really help you gain a better understanding into what’s best for your company based on your license usage patterns.

[6:55] So let me take you to this first report. It’s a LAN versus WAN simulation. We had a client which owned 11 different license servers each with local licenses on them, meaning that a France license server can only serve French users, each defined to a specific zone. So they ask the question: will it be better to just go with one server that has global licenses? So we ran the numbers. Basically what you see here in the bars stacked on top of each other is the different license servers, the local servers combined, you can see where their usage got. But if we would actually have a global license instead, imposing it on historical data, if everybody was sharing the same pool of licenses, then how many licenses will be used, what would be the max used then? Well this you can see in the red line right here, showing us about 15 to 20% usage reduction. Now a global license is a bit more expensive than local licenses, but in this case they saw it would be more profitable with just going with one global license server instead of maintaining 11.

[8:52] Now I spoke about concurrent licenses, network licenses, but you might have a mix of licenses of software or versions in your organization and you would like to stay on top of it. So this report can answer these burning questions: how many licenses do I need from each type, how many network licenses versus named licenses will I need? Let’s say you have MathWorks and MathWorks sometimes provides a pool of named licenses along with network licenses. What’s the mix between them that you need? Well you can run the data and see that users are not actually using their named license, maybe they use it one day a year. Well they can be in the floating license pool, freeing up that named license for someone who actually uses it, and you can take him from the floating license pool and give him a named license because he uses it all day every day.

[9:59] You would like to stay on top of the different versioning as well. As you know all the vendors publish new versions every year, every six months depending on the vendor. So you can keep track of which host names are actually using those old versions so you can uninstall those old versions and get new ones, because maybe you want to decommission that server but people are still using that old version, making you slightly out of compliance.

[10:40] But let’s take it one step further. Once we implement the cost into the system, so we add the contract, the allotments, the prices of the different licenses, we can get reports which are based not only on usage but also cost, meaning how much did you pay for the licenses, not only how much did you use. Expanding on that we can create different what-if scenarios and forecasts which help you answer more burning questions regarding procurement.

[11:35] As an example we have a client which came up to us with a strange case. Bentley, the vendor Bentley, offered them a new type of filter called 15-minute filter, it’s a new licensing model. So you got the old one and the new one that they offered, meaning that if someone opened Bentley and closed the application within 15 minutes that’s not a license taken. So imposing that on historical data, how much will we actually save if we would have gone with the new licensing model? So right here we can see in black the new licensing model and the old one in green, where clearly we can see that it reduces their license usage by about 10%, making it more profitable and saving about a quarter of a million dollars as a result.

[12:38] Now we track the sessions, distinct users, concurrent licenses, but also different tokens and the cost of those tokens as well, meaning that you can use Open iT to gather information and concentrate it in one place for all the different engineering licenses that you have, not only floating, not only named, all of them. Up to a point where we can even manage and monitor dongle-based licenses. So if you don’t have a license manager for it, it’s a dongle you plug into your PC as an end user and there you go, you have the license. How can you track that? Well Open iT can track that as well. Instead of tracking the license servers we track it on the workstation itself and provide different reports that indicate who has the application, who’s using it, for how long, everything, if they’re using it with a serial or without, etc.

[14:05] Lastly you might know that Open iT has three different levels. Level one tracks the check-ins and checkouts of licenses from the license server. Level two tracks if the users actually used that license which they checked out. And level three is the next logical conclusion, basically suspending the application and sending the license back in the pool for other people to use. So what does it give us? We can generate reports showing you the activity versus inactivity over the time, but not only how long they were active or inactive, also if they were suspended and how long they stayed suspended.

[15:17] So what Open iT can do, building on top of the data, because with every report you’ve seen we have the data presented as historical usage but we also have simulations and calculations which are built on top of it. So building on top of level two we can generate efficiency reports, basically telling you the amount of time spent on each level, meaning that getting two people to work at the same time, well that happens a lot, but getting 56 people working at the same time, that barely happens, it’s like 0.6% of the time, very negligible, showing us the true amount of licenses that we need. Now where is the kicker? This is based on data from level two, meaning if nobody was idling with their licenses, meaning if you start level three and harvest those licenses, then how many licenses will you actually need? So you might check efficiency and see that you can reduce anywhere between 10 to 20% of your licensing portfolio just because you might have a few licenses which are redundant and barely ever used. So if we would like to reach let’s say a 99% efficiency we can have only 54 licenses or 52, we don’t need that much. If we’re carrying 95 well then we just need around 44 licenses. Now what we see from the efficiency reports usually is anywhere between 10 to 20% in cost reduction.

[17:17] Now you can have this presented in many different ways. As you’ve seen you’ve got bar charts, line charts, heat maps as you see here which shows us the days of the week and the hours of the day and how the usage patterns are spread across the week. So if we take this as an example I have some usage during weekends which is something to be checked. I also have some usage outside of working hours, meaning users are either just taking applications leaving them open until tomorrow, which is a behavior you might want to change, or even leaving them open for the entire weekend so they’ll have it when they come back on Monday, again a behavior you might want to change. And you can have actionable insights based on Open iT raw usage data which we present in various interfaces but our favorite one is Power BI, but you can use Tableau, ClickSense, Excel, SSRS reporting, anything.

[18:41] All right so I would leave it now to you guys. If you have any questions for me about what you’ve seen, about Open iT, about data collection, then go ahead.

[18:57] Mae: Thank you very much Sagi for that insightful presentation. We’ve got several questions here from our attendees and if Sagi is all set for the question and answer session we can start now. Okay Sagi, here’s your first question: will I need to manually make the connection between tables of the OLAP Cube?

[19:31] Sagi: So no, the specialty of the OLAP Cube is the fact that everything comes bundled as one cube. Now an OLAP Cube basically holds different dimensions and measures. Now these are atomic, basically they connect to each other by default. So when you use Power BI or Tableau or any other BI tool, if it can connect to SQL Server Analysis Services then it will pull all the connections automatically. So you won’t have to define all the different data types and data points, Power BI will just do it automatically.

[20:16] Mae: Thank you. Here’s another question: what other data sources can I integrate into Open iT using Power BI?

[20:35] Sagi: So one of the strengths of business intelligence tools is the possibility to integrate many data sources. So you’ll have raw usage from Open iT which you can generate into reports, but you can add to it other data sources like ERP, like ticketing systems, you can add databases like Active Directory if you want to gain a deeper knowledge into the user. Many different options that Power BI and other BI tools allow you to integrate. So with Active Directory for example you’ll connect between the username, with the ERP system you might connect with the feature name, with the ticketing system you might connect with users again. So all these can help you gain much better insight and great visibility into your licensing environment.

[21:44] Mae: Thank you Sagi. And a third question: can Open iT track dongle-based licenses?

[21:59] Sagi: Yes we can track it as I’ve shown before. It’s tracked not only on a license server because we won’t necessarily have a license manager here. So if it’s a license manager we just monitor the log files, the lmgrd, we run several commands to get the information out of the logging of the license server. But for dongle-based we put the client component on the end user workstation. Now you can roll this client out workstation by workstation, next next next next, install all of them manually, or you can use SCCM and install them silently within the group policies of your users so they open up their system and they have the client already installed, didn’t even know it’s installed. It will run in the background and will collect information on processes which are starting up and stopping, providing you the start time and end times and all the different calculations that come with that for that dongle-based license. So we have it with CodeMeter, with some HASP licenses, many many vendors which provide it. So we define which process it will track, basically in the core component it gets transmitted to all the clients which feature, which process are we tracking, and this will flow into the same data set that you have for network or named licenses. It’s in the same data set, it will just not be a feature or a package, it will be a handle. That’s how you have distinction between those.

[23:56] Mae: Great. And we have question number four: do we have to stick with Power BI or can I use it with other BI tools?

[24:10] Sagi: So you don’t have to stick with Power BI, you can go with any BI tool. As I mentioned we dump the data into an OLAP Cube and anything that can access an OLAP Cube you can use here. Now most business intelligence tools, Excel, any data analysis tool will automatically connect to the OLAP Cube and allow you to start generating reports. Some applications might do it a bit differently, some might require a bit more manual configuration in the backend, but our favorite is Power BI and we have several templates which you can start working with. You don’t have to create the report yourself, you can either have us create it, use our own dashboards that we provide, or if you want to create it yourself and just get help and support with generating the reports, like okay what do I need to take in order to make this report, how do I filter it, all that, then we can help you as well understand the Open iT data set.

[25:34] Mae: Thank you Sagi. And we have another question here: what are the advantages that Power BI has over other data analysis tools?

[25:51] Sagi: So I would say it’s the cohesiveness with other Microsoft tools. So Power BI integrates very well into the Microsoft 365 package, so it integrates well with Teams, with your Outlook, with anything. That’s one of the benefits I would say it has over others. Beyond that the ease of use, it’s much easier to use Power BI. Ease of configuration, as I said some will require some manual work for the OLAP and Power BI doesn’t require anything, just click next, you’ve got everything there, can start working. And the amount of integratable sources. So Tableau might be able to integrate with Active Directory, some ERP systems, maybe Google or whatever, but Power BI can integrate easily with many things, Azure, SQL Server Analysis Services, all the different database services that Microsoft has. Basically it’s easily integrated into the suite and integrates more than other tools from what we’ve noticed.

[27:31] Mae: Great, thank you so much Sagi. We are actually waiting for one more question but in case it doesn’t make it, I would like to ask you for some parting words for our viewers before we end this webinar.

[27:50] Sagi: Yeah so basically you should know what you have, how well it’s used, then you can optimize your license usage, because there’s no sense in paying for licenses which you’re not really using.

[28:06] Mae: Great, thank you so much Sagi. And to all our attendees for joining today’s webinar, a quick reminder 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. For any questions or inquiries you may send us an email at webinars@openit.com. Please visit our website at openit.com and follow Open iT, Inc. on social media. You can also read our two latest blogs: Creating Customizable Reports with LicenseAnalyzer™ and Power BI, Tableau, and From Data to Decision: Leveraging Historical Usage with Power BI, Tableau Integration. Connect with one of our solutions consultants and get started with your software optimization journey. Once again this is Mae your host for today, thank you and stay safe.