Transformar o negócio através da optimização da utilização do software

[0:00] Lynn: All attendees are in listen only mode welcome everyone to the Open iT ITAM webinar transforming business through software usage optimization my name of course is Lynn Weiss and I’m going to be your host and manage the questions and answers at the end of the session for you so I will be your moderator before we start of course remember that all your lines are muted so if you have any questions as we go through the session please log them into the questions or the chat window we will try to get to all the questions either as they come in if it’s timely and needs to be addressed that way or we’ll hit them all at the end for those questions that we do not get to we will be sure to have either Linda or someone at Open iT or ITAM answer them via email afterwards so everyone thank you and welcome also there will be a recording of this event so for ITAM members they can go to the ITAM site hopefully as early as next week but we’ve got the conference coming up so things may be a little bit delayed but we hope to get it up next week and Open iT has given us a link where they are going to log a PDF downloadable from their site of the slide deck so we’ll put that on the website and I’m sure they’ll reach out to everyone after the webinar as well to let you know where you can download the PDF if you so want to so to get things moving I’d like to introduce you to Linda Cole she is the director of sales North America for Open iT she’s been in the IT industry for over 20 years in a number of capabilities and capacities her industry experience includes virtualization cloud adoption and managing IT infrastructure she employs her business management experience from various organizations to advise the clients on how to utilize technology like software metering to solve business problems in a cost-effective way and in fact this year she’s spoken at the ITAM conference in the spring we had in Henderson Nevada and she is also at the software asset management Forum in Manila Philippines that’s a trip she will also be speaking for anyone that’s coming to the conference the week after next she’s going to be at the ITAM fall Ace on November 4th at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky and she’s going to be talking about the benefits of usage metering in cloud solutions so to get this presentation moving forward I’m going to turn the microphone over to Linda.

[2:53] Linda: Well thank you very much Lynn good morning everybody thank you so much for joining us today for transforming business through software optimization usage.

[3:10] So today we’re going to go over the agenda real quick we’re just going to spend a little bit of time on some industry trends and some economic backdrop that’s affecting us in our positions within our companies in the software asset management space some forces that are driving different changes in our software asset management we’re going to talk about some industries with the biggest impact but also how that’s affecting the other industries and what’s going on we’ll spend some time on where that fits into the software asset management life cycle and then I’m going to go through some sample reports to just kind of show you and talk through some different scenarios on how usage metering and the usage data can be applicable in each of your organizations we all come up from very diverse background but that’s fine we’ll talk about what benefits that has and then we’ll wrap up with a short case study and then we’ll go into a Q&A so let’s just jump into it.

[4:11] As we all know software licensing is getting more and more complicated every month and every year as we go on the software manufacturers are continuing to change their licensing agreements and the complexity of those license agreements which I’m sure most of you on the call today are quite well aware of and so according to an IDC report 43% of organizations have increased the risk of falling out of compliance because they don’t have sufficient process and automation in place so we’ll talk about that throughout the call that it’s not just about a tool however we think a tool is pretty important and we’ll talk about all those different things today but in addition to a tool it’s really critical that we have a process that we can wrap around our software asset management or IT asset management in general and of course if you are an ITAM member you know that this is part of their four basic requirements for a software asset management program the metering component as well as the process. Gartner put out a study that last year worldwide spend on software was $400 billion that’s a huge number and because the percentage of the software spend on our budgets are going up we’re getting more and more attention on how are we going to look at our software assets and how are we going to you know report on them manage them etc.

[5:48] Part of that the interesting statistic here is that between five and 6% of that revenue was generated by audits so 46% of the enterprises in an IDC report had reported that they had been audited at least twice in the last 18 to 24 months. Now typically we think you know I’m assuming we have a diverse audience on the call today you know we think oh audits they’re targeting the Fortune 100 Fortune 500 companies but actually they’re dipping down into you know smaller medium-sized organizations so especially if you look at Microsoft Adobe companies like that so we’re not even if we’re in a medium-sized enterprise account you know we’re not safe if you will from an audit perspective so that’s why we kind of bring up some of these statistics in that same report 24% of those folks reported paying over a million dollars in true-up cost after the audits 5% reported paying 5 to 10 million and then 4% reported paying over $10 million in true up so a lot of companies have what they call a risk fund that they can fund these true-up costs out of but even if your company budgets for such a thing you know an unexpected cost that comes up clearly none of us want our organizations to have to have that type of cost going out an unexpected cost so how can we use our positions our total asset management software asset management program and then more specifically today usage metering to help mitigate this so that we can’t avoid audits we can’t stop them but there are things that we can do to help minimize the costs that are involved in that so if you have not been to an Ace conference I highly recommend it there’s a lot of breakout sessions that talk about this specifically and how you can posture your company and of course some of their certifications touch on that as well again a lot of it’s not just about a tool but a tool is one component process is the other.

[7:56] So Forrester said 60% of enterprises who have implemented some usage capabilities around their software asset management have found that beneficial so we’re going to talk about in my opinion the usage metering is a niche within a niche so sometimes a lot of folks are still managing on a spreadsheet some have purchased an asset management tool for hardware and software but they’re in the process of rolling that out that could take a year or two to get that fully rolled out one of the benefits of usage metering and usage capabilities is that it’s a very short implementation time and there’s actionable data literally in 30 days you can have that tool implemented and there’s actionable data that you can do in your organization in the next 30 60 90 days.

[9:02] So today why are we here why are we on this call we’re going to talk about a few of the reasons why companies are investing in software asset management and specifically in usage metering so one is to gain financial control how do we effectively you know plan for our future budgets avoid unexpected cost compliance again when we look at audits how do we ensure that we’re fully licensed and compliant at any time I will mention another thing that when we go through these reports that you’ll see when you go into an audit the worst again this is all discussed at the various different Ace conferences but the worst position to be in is to not have any data just to have your purchase I’ve purchased x amount of license when you have this usage data even if you’re out of compliance it puts you in the driver’s seat so we’ll talk about that when we get to some of those examples attaining better negotiating positions again how do we optimize that how do we put you in the driver’s seat as opposed to the software publishers optimizing resources again we don’t want to it might be reduction in cost it might be cost avoidance we want to make sure if somebody needs a tool let’s get them that tool but let’s make sure that we’re getting our ROI on that tool that they’re actually using it and it’s not just sitting there and then of course improve productivity how can we analyze different skills and work patterns how can we look at adoption rates etc so we’re going to step through these five different components today in our talk.

[10:42] The I mentioned that we’re going to talk about some of the industries with the biggest impact on the slide we’ve got the kind of six top industries with the biggest impact and I’ll tell you the reason they’re kind of more mature I’m going to say they’re early adopters of usage metering and the reason is that for example in oil and gas they have applications that could go up to $150,000 per single user same thing in automotive electronic they might go up to 100,000 oil and gas would be the number one in my opinion in experience but but in these particular industries here’s some examples of some software you know these applications range from $4 to $150,000 so you can see why they might be early adopters but I’m here to tell you the good news is that we’re starting to see this filter down into for example engineering has just kind of come into the market as a strong adopter of usage metering because again as those tools get more sophisticated and the cost per user goes up then people start looking at how do we optimize that the good news is for every single one of us that’s here today that usage metering can benefit us regardless of what industry we’re in so here’s some commonly used applications that almost every organization uses a Microsoft an office Adobe your organization may or may not use a project or Visio but I can bet that you’re using you know a Microsoft Office so even on the commonly used software applications that are rolled out in our organizations we’re going to show through and kind of step through some of the benefits of using a usage metering tool and what types of things you want to look for in a tool when you go out in the marketplace to evaluate.

[12:34] If this is a really high level example of the life cycle of software asset management so of course your organization they’ll define requirements they’ll go through an eval period you know you’ll buy it it’ll get implemented and then where we fit in is once the tool is operational how do we optimize that and how do we make sure that we’re maintaining so we do a really good job most companies we do a really really good job on the front end of really vetting that out and making sure we get the right tool the right feature set the right type of license agreement the right headcount but then what happens after that how do we manage that do we have any visibility of what’s going on after that point so how can we step through some of these you know how can usage metering help us gain financial control when we’re trying to look at our organizations and what some of the benefits are and let me say I’m going to probably say this many times the usage metering tool has different benefits for different people within your organization so the benefits to a CFO are different than the benefits to IT and they’re different than your if you’re the software asset manager in some organizations software asset managers participate in the negotiations and some don’t so whoever’s negotiating your agreements versus the departments where these applications are being used so again different people in your organization have different uses and benefits so you want to make sure that you have a tool that’s robust enough to not just address one particular need within the organization but they can address the needs of all the different stakeholders within your organization.

[14:30] So the first example we’re going to look at this is what we call a heat map and so down this left-hand quarter we have the day of the week and then across the top we have the hours in the day so this is just one type of representation of looking at the data and the data we’re looking at is what is the maximum concurrent usage on a particular application for a particular time frame so this test or this demo data that we’re looking at we can see that the usage as we go through the usage actually starts increasing and maxes out because we only have a total available license count of 14 in this example so it starts to max out this usage is a company that had an office in the UK as well as the US so you can see that as the UK working and then as the US comes on that they’re starting because they’ve got a global license in again in this particular example so they start maxing out so if we were looking at this data set only we might think that we need to increase our license count but if we cut the data differently this is an example of a license efficiency chart and so it’s the same data we’re looking at with 14 available 14 in use but we’re actually looking at the duration and time over the actual usage of those licenses so for example the 14th license we can look down here in the details and say what percentage of the time was that actual license in use in total hours or in duration so this report actually does the math for you so if you wanted a 99 or 95% confidence rate you can make some management decisions.

[16:33] So now that we have additional data points and this is what usage metering is all about it’s about having all the different data so we can cut it and dig into it and look at it from multiple perspectives to make more intelligent business decisions for our companies so we’re all going to have different business cultures and different needs so our outcomes might be different but the actual benefits coming from having these type of metrics and this type of data is going to be the same so we can see for example that 14th license was only used half a percent of the time the 13th 1% etc so if we were just looking at max in use we could say hey we might need to add more licenses but when we look at this confidence interval we can say no I think we’re okay I mean you could technically again depending upon your individual business cultures you could potentially even lower your license count.

[17:30] I’m going to show you another example with different numbers and again the point I’m trying to make is it doesn’t matter if it’s 14 license 140 license 1,400 license you know the actual numbers don’t matter it’s the relationship and the data that we’re really trying to drill into here but this is a bigger differential if you will in this same chart max available is 513 license max in use is 434 again if we only looked at these two data points then so we know what we purchased and then we know what we used we can say hey we can look at some potential cost reduction in the delta between these two however this one’s even more staggering so if we I don’t have all the details but I mean if we start on the 434th license I mean there’s 0% of the time it’s such low usage so again if we go to the confidence intervals that we’re looking at that potentially we could drop our license count down from 500 down into the 391 so whether your licenses are you know $500 each $1,000 each $10,000 $100,000 we can do the math but I think we can all see the benefit of looking at this this happens to be an engineering application so it’s much more expensive so this is significant dollars that are sitting here.

[19:04] This is one of my favorite slides when I attended the Ace conference in Henderson or Las Vegas back in April I repeatedly heard from most of the folks there that they struggle with how to get executive buy-in for asset management you know so they might have some of them were lucky enough that that was their full-time job is their software asset management but a lot of them they had that job as well as other jobs so they wore multiple hats but they really wanted to get buy-in from all the different areas so this is just a quick visual that I think kind of tells the story if you will so you know an example would be if the green line is what was purchased what your organizations purchased the blue line is in this particular example it’s showing if you have a license server and if you’re not familiar with that there are some applications where instead of having it installed on your desktop or the license is named user on your desktop there’s actually a license manager that you check the license in and out so the apps on your desktop but it actually checks a license in and out it’s transparent to the user but that’s what’s happening and so that’s what this blue line represents and then the red line represents what the actual usage is so in this example or scenario that I’m going to set up for you the users were moving along and they started getting denials meaning they couldn’t work they couldn’t check out the license so the company purchased more license so they bump along and boom the help desk phone starts ringing again they purchase more license well had they had again they didn’t necessarily have any usage data had they had this even if they were just looking at license check in and check out then they would have been able to see that you know we would have needed to potentially purchase this first set of additional license but we absolutely could have avoided the cost of purchasing the second time if we drill into that again it’s all about how much data we can get and how we can cut that data.

[21:20] The red line represents the actual usage so while they had that application checked out on their desktop how much were they actually using it well we can see the delta here that’s a significant difference between the two so instead of having 290 license they really were only using 140 license so even again if we look at just a we can put any number on this but for this one I just use $10,000 not $100,000 but even just at a $10,000 application that that’s a $1.5 million differential so I think you can quickly see the ROI on usage metering is typically less than 12 months and so I think we can see why that is so there’s a couple of things if you were in this scenario you have the ability to do a reduction of maintenance and support and we find that most clients are over-licensed if you don’t have a good process in place and you don’t have especially if you don’t have a harvesting component within your process we find that most of our prospects and clients are over-licensed so when they start metering or looking at usage metering they’re able to get some significant cost savings.

[22:49] If we look at you know how do we look at compliance and what are we looking at again I mentioned that sometimes it’s more important that we have some data to go into those negotiations because the software publishers will come in and they’ll start making all types of assumptions so in this particular report obviously we’re looking at the standard the bare minimum kind of standard information what applications do I have what versions do I have what type of licensing agreement do I have is it named user is it a network license is it a global or a WAN license you know what are my usage rights in that obviously what’s been purchased and most of us have that data and this is the piece that’s missing what are we actually using and where are we off what does that look like.

[23:36] Another component from a compliancy perspective is license expiration so you want to make sure that your tool is flexible and robust enough to be able to show you license expiration this particular example is showing the green are all fine yellow it’s going to expire in 60 days and red is already expired but we don’t think that’s good enough we think it needs to be a more proactive component a lot of the usage metering tools in the market are just historical reporting but we think you need to look for a tool that can actually help you manage proactively and manage by exception so if you have to go into a tool and look this data up every day or every week then that’s not very efficient on your time so you would like to look for a tool that can set up alerts so you can have this on a dashboard you might have it set up as an alert so it’s going to email you 60 days out that hey I’ve got something coming up so again that’ll help you from a compliancy as well as a usage perspective.

[24:48] The other component is again about adding these different data points as we look at the data so we know what we have we know what’s installed and we know what’s used so let’s in that example where we were over subscribed if you will where we had not purchased enough license if you were going into a negotiation you could look at how long somebody’s been in there and I’m sorry it’s in a different slide but this particular example is if you have named user agreements named on your software you want to be able to see are those users actually using it so in this example that we’ve got some users who they haven’t used it recently and they don’t have very much usage so are they no longer with the company are they not really utilizing the tool do they need to be a named user on your specific licensing agreement or can we harvest those license and use them elsewhere.

[25:48] Here’s the date last use that I was referring to a minute ago so we’ve got the application installed we know when it was installed but I’m over subscribed but it would be nice imagine the position you’d be in you’d be in the driver’s seat when you’re in an audit situation if you could say yes we had more license I mean we had more installations but I can show you and I can prove to you that we actually were not using them you’re still out of compliance but it’s a completely different dynamic when you’re negotiating with the audit team as opposed to I don’t know I know I have this much installed or I know I’ve purchased this many and I have this many employees I mean that’s literally how some of those conversations go so again the more data points we get the better information and the better management decisions that we can make.

[26:38] How can we use usage metering to you know better negotiate we talked about a few of those a minute ago from an audit perspective but I want to show you some other examples you want a tool that can simulate different types of agreements so traditionally when we would sit down with the software manufacturers and say okay we want to look at we have local you know named user versus a LAN versus a WAN and so they typically the first thing they say is okay what’s your usage and so that’s this number here we’re looking at so this report sample is showing you three different regions and the stacked bar represents the total combined but it’s by region so this is the use by region and it goes all the way up to in this particular case 15 but what if we were looking so this is if it was a LAN agreement what if we wanted to look at a global agreement well again they would just add this number up and we would do the math and calculate what the advantages were of looking at that but really if we look at the true global concurrent usage this blue line represents the true global concurrent usage so instead of 15 we only need 11 or it could be instead of 150 right we need 110 it’s not about the individual numbers it’s about the process and the data and how it applies to your particular organization so I would recommend you look for a tool that’s robust that can actually emulate these different types of agreements without you having to do anything in other words without you having to make any changes in your infrastructure.

[28:25] This is another example and we’re going to look at this where we’ve looked at the usage as a distinct or named user versus a LAN how many concurrent LAN users we have and how many concurrent WAN or global users we have so you can see there’s a huge delta and on this side we’re showing the different percentages so global or WAN licenses are more expensive than LAN licenses but if you can’t simulate this if you’re just looking at stacked usage you’re not really making the most informed decision on what type of licensing agreement that you want to look at so this one’s so different you could afford to pay eight times more for a global concurrent license than you did for an individual named user license.

[29:16] Optimizing our resources how can we look at that and you know again we talked about we don’t mind spending money if you need the tool if our associates need the tool let’s do it but let’s make sure that we’re getting a return on that investment so I put this chargeback up just to as an example to remind us a lot of organizations are not ready for chargeback but you can actually go through the process and do what we call showback meaning you go through the same type of process but you don’t actually do a financial chargeback but you actually are putting numbers to it. Halliburton actually did a couple of presentations in the spring Ace and it took them several years to implement this but they have a 100% chargeback for every single asset and even if somebody leaves a department if they don’t go through the process to turn that equipment back in harvest a license etc they continue to be charged so it helps drive behavior culture and behavior in your organizations again even if you’re just doing it from a showback perspective to make sure that people are actually using what they need.

[30:26] One example and this is a simple one that probably happens in most of our organizations is somebody says I’ll give you two a lot of organizations will go I need Microsoft Project I need it I need I have to buy it and so you’ll purchase it and then they might have really only needed it for a specific project that was 30 days or it could have been 60 or 90 days it could have even been a year the point is after that one use they were no longer utilizing the software and there’s no process in place to pull that back or there’s no chargeback meaning the department heads aren’t saying why am I paying for this when we’re not using it you know to trigger for you to be able to harvest that. Another example that I think hits all of us is Adobe so our end users in our organization will say I have to have Adobe to do my job but or an Acrobat do I really need that or can I get away with a reader and so if by utilizing a usage metering tool we’ll be able to take a look at that.

[31:30] You want to look at a tool that’s robust enough we talked about different people in the company have different value propositions and different benefits from utilizing a usage metering tool so you want to make sure you have a tool that’s very robust and that can easily you don’t want to spend I know some organizations who they’ve got folks that spend a week trying to put data together from all different sources to produce some management reports monthly you want to be able to quickly and more I would think even better subscribe to reports so that you can have different this example is dashboards it could be dashboards reporting you want to be able to target those different users and those different stakeholders in your organization and you want to be able to report it the way they want to see it so do they want to see it in a chart do they want to see it in a pie graph they want to see a histogram you know a bar how can we look at that and something that you can easily customize to each particular person and not have to regenerate something you can set and subscribe to.

[32:34] This is just one example of a dynamic dashboard. Understanding denials is another component because there’s all different reasons why people get denied a license back when we’re looking at that licensed server count and so you want to be sure that you’ve got a tool that’s dynamic that can not only report denials but why why am I getting those denials did somebody try to log into if you have licensed servers in your organization you might have seen some of this where they’re trying to log into the wrong server so it’s not really about a licensed count per se it’s other different events that are going on so you want to make sure you’ve got a tool that can give you that detailed reporting.

[33:15] Another piece from an optimization perspective is we call it license hogging but who’s checking out multiple license simultaneously different organizations have different thresholds this example is over two but it could be five that’s probably a more common one but again there could be a reason but depending upon the application and the user they might be using two licenses simultaneously if there’s a background job processing for example but especially if we’re looking at you know over five license or I you’d be surprised when we go into a new prospect and to a pilot perspective they’re like I have a feeling I know who’s kind of abusing the licensing you know folks come in in the morning and they check out a license or they check out multiple license and they’re not necessarily using them you know they’re hogging them in case they need them and I thought of a funny analogy it’s kind of like having multiple cars right in the parking lot so you know I’m not sure if I’m going to need that car but I’m going to have it just sitting there in case I need it or in case something happens to my other one I just don’t want to have to pick up the phone and call a cab or what have you so a silly analogy but we can typically only use one license at a time so it would be great if we had a usage tool that could report on that and again back to proactive and managing by exception we want something that can show us that data in a dashboard send alerts to an administrator send alerts to the end user or what have you to help manage that.

[35:00] And lastly we’re going to look at improved productivity and I’m just going to run through some examples real quickly adoption of a new particular software whether it’s Microsoft Office a new version or whether you’ve made a decision to change from one tool to another meaning that it provides the same functionality but you’ve gone from one to another I think you know it’s very expensive to maintain multiple tools to maintain maintenance and support so you want to be able to show that yes the new version is being adopted if we do need to maintain the old version for some reason let’s reduce the maintenance and support that’s an actionable item or is this a training need there’s all types of things that could happen when we look at the different types of information actual or active versus inactive use this is just again to show an example that you can measure and meter this across not only licensed servers but individual you know it can be at the browser level so again different people use the data differently in this particular one OpenWorks it looks like that’s one of those oil and gas applications expensive one it looks like it’s idle 50% of the time so we certainly have the ability to optimize this and improve productivity so that could be some training in terms of what’s a best practice for when do you check in a license what are the reasonable times that you leave it open etc whereas it might look at this and say well you know Internet Explorer is on our standards list so that’s on our standard desktop image that we push out but now wow people are starting to use Firefox and do we need to look at our standard and maybe modify or update our standard or do we need to lock down our desktops so same chart same graph different people have different uses for that data.

[37:05] So I’m going to jump into the case study and just at a high level our case study is with Murphy Oil and when they went to the marketplace these were their goals when they were looking for a tool they again we mentioned they’re looking for buy-in at the highest level they were looking for a champion an executive to support it in this they were looking for a single point of contact for managing their software portfolio from an accountability perspective they wanted to know what they had you know so what software do we have across the environment and this was at a particular region level so this was not company-wide it was very small and they wanted to know who was using it and how they were using it and of course at the end of the day it’s all about communication and accountability they wanted something that was robust enough to produce monthly usage reports etc so I’m happy to say in this particular case they chose Open iT.

[38:06] I bring up these specifics just to let you know again this is oil and gas but this was at a region level a very small region level and it was oil and gas applications but this was only 35 users that were affected so it’s not like oh there’s oil and gas it was thousands of users in this particular case study their investment was $43,000 which may seem little you know small to some and may seem large to others but I’ll show you very quickly again it’s not about the numbers it’s about the ratio of those numbers and how we can optimize and get savings within your organization so 35 users a small investment a total of $43,000 and what they were able to do is they went and looked at their applications again they identified several applications that were not in use at all so they kind of thought outside the box and said well instead of just reducing the maintenance and support on those particular applications I’m going to go to the other regions within the company and see if there’s any need for that so from a cost avoidance perspective they were able to transfer some of those licenses to other regions within the company so they had a cost avoidance saving and these are very very detailed documented cost savings that they were looking at across the board so they were able to transfer some licenses out so harvest them and transfer them to another region or another division they were able to reduce their maintenance and support and a small piece of it so they went through that and they have a documented first year savings of $1.3 million that’s huge so a $43,000 investment in first year they have a documented savings of $1.3 million so we see this type of thing at all of our clients the ROI depends on where you’re at in the license negotiation.

[40:02] For example this particular case study has kind of two successes one is this but the other is the software asset manager who originally did this project was actually recognized and promoted because they again thought outside the box and thought company-wide and they were actually promoted up to cover this same responsibility only just not for their particular region they were promoted up so it’s kind of a double success story in that regard.

[40:33] So that’s what I have for you today in how we can use usage metering to take your company to a higher level again I want to make sure I reiterate that it’s a big elephant it’s one bite at a time but usage metering is that niche within the niche so even if you’re struggling with trying to get a total asset management package deployed in your organization usage metering is a very very quick win short implementation and a quick win and again we just talked about some of these benefits today in employee productivity resources better negotiation compliance and gaining control so that wraps it up I think Lynn we can go to Q&A I hope that we’ve shown you in some of the examples I know we went fast but it’s a lot of data to cover and there’s a lot more I hope we’ve shown you some of the benefits and that some of those have resonated with you and your organizations.

[41:28] Lynn: Great thank you Linda let’s see we’ve got a couple of questions here first one oh this is a good one you shed it was quick implementation and you can get your return on investment very quickly but the first question actually is how long does it typically take to implement a metering solution.

[41:51] Linda: Okay so I can speak for my tools if that’s okay Lynn I would say most again when in a usage metering tool it’s a much shorter implementation anyone’s usage metering tool is a much shorter implementation than a whole IT or software asset management tool in our particular example we typically do a pilot and it’s a 30-day pilot before we do a full-blown installation because every organization is different and what we’re looking at and what we want to meter is different and so we can do a pilot we can have an install done within two weeks we can meter that for 30 days during an evaluation if you just wanted to say from scratch we even skipped the pilot. Again our typical turnaround time is two weeks it takes three to five man days if you will to implement a tool like this but it’s usually spread out over a two to three week period of time and that’s typically dependent on your organization and what your availability is but again you’re getting within less than 30 days let’s call it 30 days or less you are starting to collect data within your organization and so even with as little as 30 days of data even from an evaluation period you have actionable data I mean you can make much more informed decisions about your across your organization again different people use the tool differently so good question very quick implementation.

[43:28] Lynn: Okay great kind of a followup to that because you showed a number of reports out there and how long after that does it take to get that kind of good statistical reporting.

[43:43] Linda: So another great question. When I’m talking to prospective new clients their biggest frustration is how cumbersome it is and how time consuming it is to produce reports so again one of the things I talked about is you want a tool that’s robust that’s really going to work in your organization so in our particular tool we have a lot of canned or you know template based reports that come out of the box so that literally I mean within a week you could look at a week’s worth of data you can be looking at reports so the administration time on the tool is minimal and in terms of running reports you can jump in and run a report in less than five minutes most of those reports that I showed or practically all of them that I showed you are template based and you can jump in there and have that data there ready to go email whatever in less than five minutes so very robust you can also configure a dashboard I showed you a couple of examples of dashboards I mean again it’s very very simple the tool is very dynamic you can have it in Excel you can attach it to the database so you can generate reports in various different ways it doesn’t have to be in our tool if you’re using a business intelligence tool in your organization like a Spotfire or a Tableau you can generate reports there so very little administration and reporting is very dynamic and very simple and quick.

[45:18] Lynn: Okay so I assume a number of those reports were canned reports how much customization is available can the end users customize the reports to some extent.

[45:37] Linda: Absolutely. All the data set that we talked about that’s why we talk about it’s about collecting that data and how we cut it and slice it so that’s all stored in a SQL database so we have you know the cube that we can do so customizing reports is very simple and again you can do it in our tool you can do it in Excel you can do it in any business intelligence tool that connects to a SQL database so customization is very simple I know it’s not a lot of folks that use SQL they have to learn Crystal Reports and that’s cumbersome the other advantage is once you’ve defined a particular dashboard or a particular report you want you can save that so you just create it once you don’t have to recreate it every month you can subscribe to reports you can have a dashboard that goes to particular departments you know again different dashboards different people and they just click on the link to refresh the data you can send them their reports in an Excel format with slicers if your organization uses slicers in Excel so it’s Office 2010 or higher that has slicer capability so they can actually change for example let’s say you send them a year’s worth of data they could change it to a quarter they could change from looking at this app to another app so they can actually do that dynamically so the actual end users themselves end up kind of customizing what they’re looking at.

[47:03] Lynn: Okay all right great another question here is can the product be run on different servers at the same time such as some other products and maintain and a mainframe at the same time in order to get one combined report is that possible.

[47:22] Linda: Yes yes great question so that’s kind of the beauty of one of the benefits of our tool is we give you a global single view we have a real-time monitor view that actually shows you all of the different license servers throughout your organization so and those could be Windows based they could be Linux based you know it doesn’t matter we show you a global view of that and then again you have filtering so you can cut the data and look at that so you can look at it by geography by license server by feature there’s all different ways that you can do that but yes single view for your entire global organization.

[48:11] Lynn: Okay great I think we’ve got time for one more question here one person has asked how can I use a usage metering solution to negotiate now this is very specific pay-per-use contracts is that something that’s done on a regular basis.

[48:26] Linda: Yes we actually are partnered with several software publishers where they have standardized on our tool as their tool for pay-per-use agreements and what I mean by that is if you enter into a pay-per-use agreement with them they require you to use our tool to actually report on that but I also have many examples of clients who they’re in pay-per-use agreements and there’s a delta because the way we do the usage metering is we’re not just looking at a you know a flex log off of a FlexNet server if we’re using the example from the other question we’re not just looking at log files so our tool is much more complex than that but a lot of the software publishers are just looking at one data point again it’s the same advantage we talked about usage metering the more data points you have the better the data so they’re able to sit down with the software publishers and say here’s my actual true usage and so they can negotiate pay-per-use agreements are very different for different manufacturers so it might be I have a bundle and I burst over it or it’s just a true usage but I have many examples and one just again this week where there was a discrepancy on a pay-per-use that actually was a $100,000 discrepancy and they were able to use our tool to prove that it was an error on the software publisher side and that I mean just this week $100,000 delta.

[50:05] Lynn: Okay great thank you good question great I think that’s all we have time for at the moment so I want to thank everyone for participating in today’s webinar especially Linda Cole here is her contact information and the Open iT website if you have any additional questions please be sure to direct them directly to her or you can always send them to info@ITAM.org and we will pass them along remember hopefully next week this recording will be available on the website as well as the link to download a copy of the presentation slides which will link you to Open iT’s website so everyone thank you for participating today and this concludes today’s presentation bye now.

[50:47] Linda: Thank you Lynn y’all have a great day.

[50:51] Lynn: You too bye now.