Open iT Experts: Top 7 Features to Look for in v9.17

[0:06] Mae: Good morning and good evening everyone! Welcome to today’s webinar entitled Open iT Experts: Top Seven Features to Look for in Version 9.17. My name is Mae and I am your host for today. In a short while, our speaker Ace Lopez will be joining us. Before we get started, let me share with you a reminder that everyone is encouraged to ask questions. You may drop your queries in the comments section and Ace will try to address it during the Q&A session of our webinar. If we are not able to answer all of the questions, or if there are any questions that need further investigation, rest assured that it will be sent to Ace and we will reach out via email or through LinkedIn.

[0:46] Our presenter is a Solutions Engineer specializing in IT Resource Analysis, Management and Optimization with four years of combined experience in Technical Pre-sales and Analysis as a Trainer, Data Analyst, and Business Consultant. He has great appreciation for financial efficiency and concepts of future proofing. His involvement with companies under different verticals particularly the energy and engineering industries serves as his ground for developing practicable management methods specially for SAP. Everyone, we have Ace Silvestre Lopez.

[1:24] Ace: Thank you, Ms. Mae! Hello, everyone. Thanks for being here, pleased to be presenting today and in this one we’ll talk about what’s new at Open iT. Especially the top seven features to look for in version 9.17. I know it hasn’t been a while but why not. All right, let’s keep talking about more fresh Open iT features coming your way.

[1:52] Okay, for those who might not be very familiar with us, our flagship solution is conveniently a good summary of what we do and who we are so this should be a good start. Introducing LicenseAnalyzer™ 2022, a three-level pyramid solution that allows you to meter, analyze, and optimize your licensing landscape with ease and accuracy.

[2:18] Level one is a lot about licensed traffic, check-in and check-out the licenses, purchased or installed versus peak or average concurrent usage. Usage data can be collected from either the license managers in the license servers or from workstations. When we collect data from standalone and web-based applications. The data are presented in real-time pages, SSRS reports, dashboards in Excel, dashboards in Power BI, built-in dashboards, and more.

[2:53] Level two is a tool that starts adding the ability to collect and report about application usage status which mainly are either active or inactive time or session count. This we do by using application-specific configurations around usage of CPU, input-output, keyboard and mouse. So one of our signature reports with LicenseAnalyzer™ Level 2 is our active versus inactive time report. And on the application level, that can help compare usage between similar applications and even indirectly exposed productivity levels between those applications. Then on the user level the active versus inactive elapsed time report can expose usage patterns that can be used to manage individual entitlements and license grouping policies.

[3:48] Level three adds the gold at the top of this pyramid and you know. But in terms of utility LicenseAnalyzer™ level three enables an automatic harvesting mechanics versus idle application sessions so that whenever an application goes to an inactive state, the tool proceeds to send pop-up warnings with the ultimate purpose of releasing the licenses checked out from idle usage, that’s hands-free optimization. You may, and of course, there are programs and policies around this. That could be created and imposed for setting up priority users or saving and auto-saving current projects before we close the applications. Those are all available to be put in place.

[4:38] Okay, now let’s talk about the new stuff. The first group of new features relates to metering and analysis. Now one way or another, these updates come with newly collectible data, which means that they allow us to generate either reports that were never before seen or reports that are improved versions of what we already have.

[5:03] To start off, for number one, we now support metering and analysis for SaaS applications. And by definition SaaS, or Software as a Service, is a way of delivering software through licensing or subscription where the platform is accessed online rather than bought and installed in individual computers. Now, quick context, in a study conducted last year April, Gartner estimated that in this year 2022 SaaS expenditures will reach 145.4 billion. Fast forward to March 2022 which was well, last quarter, the SaaS market is already worth 170 billion dollars. Now this comes in as no surprise because you know on the company level, these SaaS applications they keep adding up. In fact, they’ve been doubling yearly since 2022 and in turn, it’s much much easier to waste money on mismanagement and misuse of these applications. So for instance you can expect to see more duplicate or orphaned apps in the licensing systems especially those who will employ hybrid deployments. And well, just like that we now support SaaS applications, and our LicenseAnalyzer™ 2022 can integrate to vendor portals to APIs to collect ownership and assignment information and combine it with usage collected from application hosts and license servers.

[6:36] Ultimately, this allows us to create comprehensive reports such as; first one, license ownership versus installation or assignment usage. This is very useful when you’re trying to monitor license inventory and to check how the users license entitlements fit their actual usage or the other way around. And current license agreements versus other agreements, very useful when exploring options for acquiring similar assets on different licensing models. And while these first two kinds of reports that we do here would speak volumes when used to profile users and user groups, we also have compliance check-up. All to us these are kind of the basic and mid-way through the contract or before audit kinds of reports where we answer doubts on compliance and with much detail about. So this one’s staple and you imagine, there are many ways to create these reports, could even be compounded reports. Then we have license optimization and cost reduction. In our experience, the motivation that sparks upon seeing a detailed potential savings report goes a long way. It’s very handy so we highly recommend that you give this one a try.

[7:58] And these are some of our customers’ SaaS providers that we either started supporting or will start supporting soon.

[8:12] Okay, the next one at number two, we now support Autodesk Cloud Named User Subscription and Flex. Quick context again, since 2017 Autodesk has shifted its focus to Named User Licensing Model. Now, everyone is quote-unquote more than just a serial number, which is really, wow! Their goal is to get every user to have their own Named User License one way or another but technically, there’s about 100 million Autodesk users so workaround options have been consistently given to the customer base. And well, we have a whole webinar dedicated to explaining our complete solution for Autodesk. But to highlight what’s new, like new-new, we now support Autodesk Cloud Named User Subscription and Flex. Okay. Currently, we have raw reports that we can generate like this one, license assignment report.

[9:14] And well, this report can be used to check if the users are using their proper licenses. As you can see here so it’s a Named User License for these users here we also have email versus Windows Authentication Report or as we’d like to call it Compliance Report. Well, since the new licensing model is more strict to who uses the licenses and from where, in this report, the admin can investigate if there is a mismatch between the user’s email and the Windows accounts that’s used. As you can see highlighted here in yellow.

[9:57] Okay, there are really countless other reports that could be made with the reinforced data that we have for Autodesk and or other SaaS applications. But again, we can report about the product, the feature, the users, user groups, and their corresponding contract code, subscription code, license type, and measurements like the usual elapsed time, max use, day since last used, and well time buckets per year, per month, per week, or per day, even per hour. Right, so all those are still very much available for mixing and matching of data and for more solid and spontaneous analysis. And with this data, in fact, you can imagine reports like user level compliance, usage reports or license subscription, and product assignment reports. As I’ve been mentioning from earlier. We’ve also been designing dashboards in business intelligence tools especially in Power BI to ready up these data for further analyses.

[11:06] And here’s an example. Okay, here we have the current costs and potential savings as overviews. Then we have own versus assigned versus use, that’s a meter. Then we have the daily usage trend, and then number of distinct users by feature. And we even have user-level list with a column for day since last used. And well this is just a sneak peek. In fact, there are more sheets to just this one dashboard.

[11:56] Okay, number three, Support for Adobe Creative Cloud. So Adobe CC for short, that has should have been much busier compared to when it was released around a decade ago. And well that reason along with the compiling customer requests that we’re receiving are basically pushed us to take steps towards improving our support for Adobe CC. And the current reporting capabilities extend to the following types of reports. This one being user assignment report, this shows Adobe usage with the users and their corresponding license type, a good report to use to find out usage proportions across different license types of Adobe.

[12:42] Then we also have Product Inventory Report, there’s information about whether certain features are installed or not. And if so, where, in which host, with what license type and version and more. So very useful in exposing shelf licenses and you know orphaned licenses and the like stuff. Then we have Usage Report for Named User Licensing, and this is where we start incorporating Named User Licensing data into the mix. Usage Report for Shared Device Licensing. This one is critical for compliance as you know, sharing licenses have contractual limitations and consequences now.

[13:34] Introducing Open iT Data Monitor and Alerts. Okay, we can all agree that the degree of usefulness of our results is kind of predicated on the quality of data that we are able to collect or extract. Right now, on top of the existing ways by which Open iT checks and monitors the quality of data it collects, we are now introducing at number four this one, Data Monitor and Alerts. So, we can now show records about the daily file count and file size of each vendor license. We can also evaluate license status files to get the number of registered vendors which will serve as the baseline for detecting daily variations. Let me highlight this one.

[14:24] Okay, so this is a data overview and data trends report for the last 90 days. Now, in this overview file counts deviating from baseline are highlighted while with their corresponding file sizes. This is again a good way to check if the expected data are collected and read by our tool. Okay, these are also appearing in table portlets in our dashboard section in the analysis server. As you can see here, data overview, missing data files, and ultimately you receive this alert, or when there are mismatches in the file count, file size, and you know, from the baseline.

[15:31] Okay, at number five, introducing Canned Reports. And this feature allows users to generate some of our signature reports from the Analysis Server without actually needing to install an Analysis Server. Now, the idea of developing an API to kind of by-pass the need for SQL mainly for lightweight querying has been around the team for quite some time but there’s more to it now because you know number one we keep finding out that some of our long-time customers have had an acquired taste for our core reporter and well they love this so why not. And two, processing huge amount of data in SQL, that’s what we’re using now, for just a couple reports sometimes it takes a long time. Right, so here’s how our signature reports look as canned reports. They’re quite identical to be honest. So this is utilization trend, this is the heat map, shows you the busy hours of the days of the weeks or the months depending on which version, and then the license efficiency chart. So, this shows you the impact of each of the concurrency levels that you have seen are observed as peak instances.

[16:56] Okay, at number six, Support for More License Managers. Now, this list of license managers that we support, it keeps growing right. Although the challenges of supporting more gets trickier, we still are able to keep up and make sure that we support more and more. Used to be it was just Flex, right, but well while there are more of these license managers, we’re still keeping up so that’s a good thing. And again, the best part is that this list is always open for more requests. So whenever customers have some other applications that we’re currently not supporting, license managers, we just ask them, once they let us know kind of automatically backlog those license managers for our development to proceed next.

[17:53] Okay, and in here we highlight four. So we have now support Honeywell, especially the token, then Icarus, Materialize, and Tasking License Manager for network license.

[18:12] Okay, the second group of new features helps in Management and Administration. And this one’s for the admins out there. At number seven, introducing One Portal. This is a console that helps manage some key Open iT configurations more intuitively. And this release includes Product Mapping Interface and the Module Activator. I’ll talk about the Product Mapping Interface first. So you already know we can assemble licensing and usage data across multiple license servers and we call the result global server. And the process as product mapping. Technically, it’s creating virtual combination of the usage and licensing data of any group of license servers that you desire to simulate together. Now, the product mapping interface here makes this process much easier not just, you know, for us but especially for the Open iT users out there. And previously, our customers will need to, you know, more of these configurations, will need to assist them with more of these configurations, but now it’s as easy as grouping cards for all of us. So as usual the results of these combines can then be compared to the data from single servers or other intended combinations. This is how you edit the map. Map them together. These are panel for results.

[19:56] Okay, now let’s talk about the Module Activator. So this one gives you the option to activate or deactivate specific data collectors across the network of Open iT clients. So one obvious use for this is when you have LicenseAnalyzer™ Level 3. This gives you the option to activate or deactivate the license harvesting mechanism on certain workstations or host groups at any time. In summary, one portal helps save precious time for administrators, limits the notorious and inevitable element we call user error, and helps accelerate onboarding of new users by providing a more user-friendly interface for managing relevant configurations. More on this soon actually, it’s kind of a very new update, so more of this soon.

[20:56] Okay, I know I said seven, but here’s a bonus for everyone. So we have more improvements in CLIMS. It’s been one of our busier plugins for quite some time now. So for those who are new to CLIMS, by the way, the name stands for Centralized License Integration and Management Server. This tool allows administrators to manage license managers on a single interface and well it’s where you can remote stop or start license servers and edit license and option files with version control. And more naturally so our recent improvements include support for new license managers tNavigator and Sentinel RMS. Plus now we support authentication methods for Windows authentication user or user groups, Open iT connect authentication or OIDC, and security assertion markup language or SAML 2.0. And yes, that’s about it for these features. But you know much more improved improvements are actually in place. Feel free to contact us when or whenever you have a desire to know more information about what else are there. But for the meantime, we can take your questions and answer them.

[22:23] Mae: Thank you, Ace for that very insightful presentation! Well, we’ve got several questions here, many of which we received through asktheexperts@openit.com so let me address this first question to you. I’m curious about your support for Autodesk Cloud Subscription and Flex. How is it done?

[22:44] Ace: Okay, yes. Autodesk Flex is now supported along with the Autodesk Named User Subscription Licenses and this was made possible by combining data from different sources, that’s number one. And the primary data source for Autodesk Flex support is from the Autodesk accounts or what they call the Autodesk Portal. And from user workstations, that’s a second, that’s from us then. The newly collected data are sorted out, some are integrated into our existing data tables while you know some are put in an entirely new data set. Now we can create reports that can be used to check the compliance of our customers to these new Autodesk licensing models with these data and the reports that thereby come. If that answers the question.

[23:34] Mae: Thank you. Second question, you mentioned the term product mapping, can you elaborate on what it is and why it could be important?

[23:48] Ace: That’s okay, product mapping as I maybe mentioned is a tool we use to simulate combinations of license servers usually those that contain licenses from the same vendor or product. It helps, number one, visualize and quantify licensing and usage. And then second, the scenarios that may come from those data and you know as we simulate these servers, usually they come from different locations so simulating them together gives you a concrete view of what’s really happening on you know the data level. Regardless of where they’re located, so you get the tally of usage on different license servers and some idea about how to improve it from the product feature and user level. If that answers the question.

[24:34] Mae: Thank you, and we have a third question here. Are there any differences between the canned reports and the ones you create in Analysis Server?

[24:49] Ace: Okay, the canned reports are technically identical to the template reports that we have in AS in Analysis Server. The difference is in the components that we use in processing the data. The intention in creating these canned reports is to give our core users a taste of the extensive analysis that could be had with the Analysis Server. But in any case, it does add flexibility to reporters whichever platform they choose to use. So, yep.

[25:27] Mae: Thank you very much and that wraps up our webinar. Thank you so much, Ace and to all our attendees for joining our webinar today. Since we are running out of time, all questions that we haven’t been able to answer will be sent to Ace and we will get back to you via email or through LinkedIn. A quick reminder that this webinar is recorded and can be immediately replayed after this stream. We will also upload it on our website together with Ace’s presentation. We’d like to take this opportunity to invite you to listen to Talk iT: A SAM for Engineering Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts. Also, please visit our website to view our upcoming events at openit.com or connect with one of our solutions consultants, we are glad to assist you on your software optimization journey. Always be updated, follow us on social media. Once again this is Mae, your host for today. Thank you and stay safe!