Part 2 | How to Evaluate Your Autodesk® Portfolio for an Optimized Licensing Position

[0:01] Mae: Good morning everyone, and welcome to the second session of Open iT’s Live Webinar Series. How to Evaluate Your Autodesk Portfolio for an Optimized Licensing Position. My name is Mae and I am your host for today. Very shortly our presenter, Linda Cole will be joining us. Before we get started, let me encourage everyone to ask questions. Just drop your questions in the chat box and Linda will address them in the Q&A session of her presentation. If we don’t have the opportunity to answer all of the questions or if there are any questions that need further investigation, rest assured that we will send them to Linda, and we will reach out via email or through LinkedIn to answer those inquiries.

[0:43] Our presenter today has been an industry speaker since 2014, based in Houston, she is a high energy senior-level consultant with more than 25 years of diversified experience in the technology industry. A proven leader with a unique blend of responsibilities in small and large organizations with a passion for building successful businesses. Currently, she is helping clients solve their business issues around software licensing. Ladies and gentlemen, we have Linda Cole.

[1:15] Linda: Thank you very much, Mae for that introduction. And I’d like to say good morning, good afternoon, and good evening we’ve got people joining from all across the world. So we’re happy to have you in whatever time zone you’re at. And this is our second in a series so we’re going to cover Autodesk licensing, what to look at before you have renewals coming up, we’re going to dive into some specific examples around Token Flex and converting whatever license type you have to the new Named User Subscription or Autodesk Flex, and then kind of talk about next steps. So let’s just jump in if you weren’t in our last series that is recorded you can go back and look, but we talked about all the different types of licensing that Autodesk has and it can be quite confusing and most of you have some combination thereof. But as I promised last time, we’re going to look, go into a little bit more detail.

[2:08] So what do you want to look at when you look at your licensing position before you go into a vendor negotiation? You know, first and foremost, you really want to gather data for the entire enterprise. So some of you have centralized procurement and contract management. But some of you have it by region, but you still want to look at your entire portfolio across all of the different regions to understand what’s going on across the environment and you want to look at things like, you know what applications do you have, the quantities, what type of licensing, the location, because a lot of your licenses are location specific, expiration dates owners, and cost. So if you put that in a matrix then you’re able to quickly sort.

[2:57] So here we can see a quick example where we sort by license type, so we have all of our concurrent together, all of our subscription. And so depending upon what we’re doing and where we’re at we want to look at this data differently then we can easily just sort by okay I want to evaluate what’s going on with my AEC collection, and you can see we have a combination of licenses. And it starts to point into where you need to look for just from a overall perspective and I’m going to show you more detail, but then you also want to look by date. So you need to determine what’s urgent and what’s important. So if we have the cost element in there, as well that would help further pinpoint where you need to look, and spend more time when you’re looking at the overall portfolio.

[3:45] As I mentioned we’re going to talk a little bit about Token Flex and converting to Named User Subscription. But let’s talk, let’s start with Token Flex, you know with this it’s typically for the extra large global enterprise accounts and they are typically three years. So you really want to look at what your usage trends have been over the last 36 months, and I suggest you really look at a month over month and year over year trend to see if you have any anomaly seasonality things of that nature. For example, a lot of you have interns that come in in the summer, so your usage goes up and down. You know we want to take those into account when we’re looking at how many tokens that you need.

[4:31] So for those of you who aren’t familiar, you purchase a large bucket of tokens that spans a three year period of time and typically Autodesk wants you to divide those tokens over the year, and so each year is independently measured. So this is why we want to look at all the data to have to make an informed decision. You could separate it equally across the three years but if you have growth plans or anything you want to look, and see what that is. And I highly encourage you to try to negotiate some percentage of that overall total bucket of tokens across the entire three year period. So initially, when they first did Token Flex, that wasn’t really an option. But we have a lot of customers who have successfully done that. So there’s a bucket that spans three years and then there’s still buckets of tokens that have the annual expiration. So it’s a use it or lose it. Of course, if you run out of tokens and you have to purchase more during your three-year contract, the effective token price goes up. So that’s why we want to look at as much data as possible.

[5:40] We want to look at your usage data with the filters. That’s where you have a grace period. If you will you check out a license, and you check it back in in less than five minutes, and they don’t count that as usage but you also want to look at time zones, we’ve seen a lot of customers where maybe their IT group and their license servers or maybe over in India but the bulk of their users are in Europe, or they’re in North America, and so this will affect your token consumption, because of course as you span over midnight right that it goes up you also want to look at overages and shortages and really keep an eye on what that looks like.

[6:20] Here’s an example of that time zone optimization so here we can clearly see that the reporting and the time zone is set in a different time zone than where the bulk of our users are because we can see the usage is spanning over midnight. So effectively all of these users, they’re going to pay the token rate at 11 PM and then at 12 PM midnight, when they span over here they’re going to pay again. So you can set the date timestamp on your license server. Super simple, so that it matches up to where the bulk of your users are. I’ve seen this have an effect between 2 and 10 percent of the overall cost of the tokens being utilized and this is a simple, simple fix, but you need usage today to be able to look at that we talked about looking at month over month and year-over-year trends.

[7:13] So here we’re looking in a three-year contract we’re not quite finished with the contract. Well we’re looking at the token consumption by month now we had a partial month in July and because this particular customer had a shutdown over Christmas. We ignored that piece but we tracked where our min and max were to see if we had any consistent seasonality and in this particular data set you can see that we don’t. Now, we should have a plus or minus 2.7 burn rate month over month and you can see we’re kind of all over the map, it goes up and down and if we look at the averages over the year, right, the burn rate would be 33 percent and you can see that we’re behind that. So if you were actively metering, this particular token usage you would see very clearly in year one that you’re not utilizing anywhere near the amount of tokens that you’ve already purchased.

[8:12] And at that point, I suggest you go back to the vendor and see if you can trade in some tokens we have seen a couple of customers who were successful at trading in or selling tokens back they didn’t get the same value that they paid for them but they were able to sell them back for consulting services or training services. So there’s another hint or idea if your burn rate is not up where it should be. Another way you can look at that is you know on a gauge right so here we’re 92 percent of the way through the contract. But again, we’re only 84 or 85 percent of our token use so having a gauge or a meter to be able to monitor that on an ongoing basis is important. And of course, it’s important because then you don’t want to necessarily buy the same number of tokens when you’re going into renewal.

[9:03] So let’s look at what it takes to convert or the type of information we want to look at to make it the most effective license position. When we’re going to convert from anything, typically concurrent or standalone but over to the new Named User Subscriptions, some of you might have a combination that first example I showed they had a combination of Concurrent and Named User. And a lot of you are in that situation, because your concurrent maintenance is not expired, but you needed to add some licenses recently and you weren’t able to add any more perpetual. So you’ve got this combination but you want to look at the usage trends again over the last. This time, we’re going to look at 12 to 18 months because when we’re looking at subscriptions those are typically 12-month periods of time. You can get a discount for having a multi-year, but we want to look in what those trends are we want to identify all the applications that had zero usage. We don’t want to buy anything that we had zero usage at for the last 12 or 18 months. Of course, we want to look for anomalies distinct user accounts, distinct user days, and I’m going to show you examples of how that plays out.

[10:11] You also want to look at what your versions are. That you’re using so many of you have engineering projects especially in the construction industry where maybe you have a five-year construction project that’s standardized on a specific version that’s older than what’s going to be supported when you convert. So you may want to keep a couple of your perpetual, and then of course in the new Named User Subscription, you have individual applications or you have collections or packages, and you want to be able to identify and evaluate when it makes sense to do which one. So in this example, we’re just looking at a list of our apps we have what we own this happens. This is concurrent right what we own in concurrent licensing, and you can see that we did not even at any point in time, we did not even max out on some of these. On this particular one, we did and this one but we want to identify as again those packages or applications that had zero usage now they still are they have extended because of the pandemic the two for one trade-in so that you can trade-in your Concurrent Licensing for two Named User Subscriptions. So if we do the math on that you can see that we’re plus or minus on the different applications, but I recommend that you don’t just look at this information we want to look at the usage information to get a more optimized position, but this will give you again a quick view of whether you’re going to have shortages or overages just from a financing perspective. This is where a lot of people got caught because this delta in a lot of instances was much much higher.

[12:00] So let’s look at, I mentioned this last time we can take the not all applications have a token equivalent, but I will tell you just yesterday, Autodesk added additional applications in their list of what’s available in their new Autodesk Flex or their token program. You’ll want to take a look at that, and if you may or may not have noticed, they also had a price increase in the last week. So I’ve converted this from our last time, so our break even if you will has changed in terms of the number of days. But we can easily take your individual users information and calculate the break even and determine what the best position would be.

[12:44] So if we take a look at that this is about 112 users I think and we just sorted them by distinct user days meaning that over the last 12 months these particular this list of users only had between 1 and 79 distinct user dates. So if you converted them to Flex right, this would be the equivalent of seven tokens for these single users. If we take those and say okay we’re not going to assign a named user subscription to this list but we are to the rest then we have 84 users that are going to get the Named User and 28 that are going to get tokens well because we have the user days. We can actually calculate the exact number of tokens based upon this historical usage that we need, and then of course you’re going to apply. If you have you know, there’s a new project coming up or whatever the individual attributes are of your company and culture, but for this example we calculated what exactly we had used, and if we do the math had we converted all of our users over to the Named User Subscription, it would have been 211 thousand 120 dollars but because we have this usage data and we can do this analysis now we can do the math on that again I’ve got the new higher prices in here. It’s only 169 000 or a 41 000 dollar savings. That’s about 20 percent, so it’s definitely worth it to do that.

[14:13] But let’s layer on some additional data and let’s layer on the day since last used. So this whole list of users they have not used the product in more than 60 days now, you can determine what for your organization and it could be to buy department maybe it’s not for the whole organization, but you can determine where you want this threshold to be, but in this example we’ve set that threshold at 60 days so now we have 22 users right, and it’s a combination of those that we had slotted for Named User or tokens. We can redo our calculations and now I only need 73 named user subscriptions and 17 are going to use tokens but now I only need 1740 tokens. We do the math on that and now I’ve taken the contract down to 142 000 which is savings of 68 000 or 32 percent. So we went from 20 to 32 percent savings by doing this particular exercise, so pretty interesting to be able to just quickly go through export that data sorted, etc.

[15:29] Now remember I told you you want to look at usage as well. So here you can see we’ve got somebody only one user but they’re still using 2016. So you can look and see who that user is determine if that’s applicable or not do they need to keep that, or is it a training issue do we need to train that person, or these two people on 2018, or what have you so you want to look at that version usage as well.

[15:57] We talked about reviewing collections, so as you may or may not be familiar with especially if you, depending on what type of licensing you came from but Autodesk offers not only their individual applications but they package them or bundle them in what’s referred to as collections. So the AEC collection is one of the more popular ones but even inside that collection there’s specialty so infrastructure design building design construction, and you can see this is just a partial listing they have about 10, let’s say average of applications that are included, and so some of those these all have a cost to them some of them don’t but you want to be able to figure out does this particular user need. For example, let’s say they use AutoCAD right you can see that AutoCAD shows up in all of these but do they need just AutoCAD or are they using a combination of AutoCAD and Revit or AutoCAD and Civil 3D. So if you look at the pricing you can see AutoCAD and Civil 3D is more expensive than just purchasing the collection which gives the users access to that whole list of applications that are in the collection.

[17:11] So you can look at the collection usage or you can look at the individual users and determine which particular collection may be applicable and this will give you some additional optimization as well as maybe some productivity. So you’ve got some users who will since they have additional, they have additional applications they can use maybe they can utilize them in their day-to-day operations. So if we look at the usage data around that when it’s not when you haven’t optimized, this is what can happen. So this is the AEC collection and you can see these are all the individual applications within that collection but only 29 people were using Civil 3D and 56 were using AutoCAD. So we can see the delta even if we added the Civil 3D and Revit, and said these are distinct users they’re not. There’s no overlap, you can still see we have some percentage of those that are using AutoCAD, only that I would recommend you just license for AutoCAD and not necessarily the collection does that make sense so here’s another way to look at that data.

[18:30] I’ve just masked the user IDs here but here’s where this is what product they’re assigned to and the individual products, so we can see that this particular user is assigned to the collection but they only ever use Civil 3D. This particular user is assigned to a different collection, product design, and they only used AutoCAD and they only used it for one day. So for sure that’s probably going to be a token we’re not going to want to give them a Named User Subscription, and I just picked some of the smaller ones so they would fit on the screen but again, you can see this example again, AutoCAD only this user again only one day but if we go here to the bottom we’ll see this particular user was using a combination of Civil 3D and AutoCAD. So they definitely, you want to assign them the AEC collection.

[19:27] So let’s review some of the things we talked about before, but after you go through all your usage data don’t forget there’s additional discounts. If you do a multi-year subscription, if you set automatic renewal, then you can receive some additional discounts. But from an ongoing perspective to maintain that you’re going to do all this work when you go into your vendor negotiation and your new contract, you want to make sure that you’re reviewing the data on a monthly or quarterly basis. Again, depending upon the size of your operation and what you’ve going on, you could do it monthly or quarterly but you want to make sure that you’re keeping up with that.

[20:07] So remember you can’t manage what you don’t meter. Data is king. We highly suggest that you start metering as soon as possible, if you’re not, you can get some of this data. There’s all different ways to do it some of this, it depends on what type of license you have currently. As to how you can get that data if you’re on a concurrent licensing model. Some of that data lives on your license manager, so even if you don’t have a tool or a solution to help present that usage information there are still ways to get that information. But you want to get started as soon as possible, I want to mention I think I forgot last time but if you’re interested, we’re happy we on our website if you click under the contact us, you can schedule a one-on-one consultation with one of our business consultants and you’d actually connects with my calendar, and some of my colleagues. So you can schedule if you have specifics, we encourage you to ask questions today but also you can schedule a one-on-one with me or one of my colleagues and we can talk about your specific environment, what you’re doing, what your timelines are, and that type of thing, and we’re happy to help you. In any way we can so with that I’m going to turn it back over to Mae so we can address some of these questions.

[21:31] Mae: Thank you so much, Linda for that very insightful presentation. And yes looking at our chat box, here we have a question. If you’re ready, Linda I should pull this question at you now so, “I have a general question, I am thinking in the tool used by Autodesk available in the website to see reports usage. Can we trust on these results comparing with Open iT tool, for example?”

[21:55] Linda: Yes that’s a great question and the answer is yes. It depends on what type of support you have. So if you have just a Named User Subscription then you don’t get the, you have general usage information but you don’t see the details. So you would want to use a solution like Open iT or something to get that specific end user detail if you have premium which is 300 per user, per year. Here in the US, it’s actually more expensive in some of the other areas then you get some additional reporting but it’s not as detailed. But yes we do marry up that information and we do validate that information against the vendor reporting then I will tell you to note the reporting in your Autodesk portal is on a UTC so take that into consideration when you’re digging down and doing your analysis. So it might not be presented in your local time zone the way if you were looking through a different tool or solution would be.

[23:11] Mae: Thank you, Linda! If you can see here, I think this is from the same user. He or she added that they have tokens licensing model.

[23:17] Linda: Yeah, so on Token Flex that is coming off of the license manager and absolutely we are metering that at the license server, and so yes, our information is mirroring up. We’ve done some tests and it again depends on how it’s said, etc. But we have done validation projects for customers against their Token Flex usage and some of that has to do with the mapping of it’s different right from the Named User Subscription, and so it has to do with the mappings on your products. And so yes we can absolutely do that in the Token Flex model. We can do a lot in the Token Flex model because we’ve got access to the data from the license server itself we have a little data collector that sits there so great question.

[24:18] Mae: Thank you, anything else? Also, we have received several questions sent prior through our optimizeautodesk@openit.com address. Okay, yes. I would like to ask this to you, Linda. “If we have decentralized purchasing, why do you say we need to look at the enterprise usage?”

[24:33] Linda: So great question, and I have a lot of folks that asked me this, but the reason is I’ve seen several different scenarios. So I’m going to give you a couple of examples. I have seen it where let’s say you have the bulk I’m just going to make up an example the bulk of your users and the biggest contract is in Europe right, but you have a smaller subset of users in North America and your contract in Europe, it’s the biggest one so you think your price is going to be less expensive, right, the more you buy the less effective cost per user but I’ve seen it where when customers start to look at that from an enterprise perspective some of those smaller contracts. Meaning the same vendor they actually did a better job for whatever reason you know it’s a region, it’s a sales rep it’s all of those things they actually have better pricing. So one it improves and helps you in your overall negotiation to make sure that you’re getting at least the best deal that anyone in the company regardless of region.

[25:34] The other thing I’ve seen is and this is very specific very vendor-specific. But let’s say you have an excess of licenses in one area one region and you’re short in another. Well, instead of purchasing new licenses in that region. You know, see if you can negotiate with the vendor to transfer depending upon the regions depending upon all of that stuff. It may have a small fee, but it’s going to be less expensive than purchasing a whole new set of licenses where you’re short and then you’re paying and the other reason for region where you’re not even using them so this is why we say to look at your overall portfolio to help everybody in the organization.

[26:21] Mae: Great question. Thank you again, Linda. And I think that we have one more. We have a little bit of time for one more question. And this is, “We are going through an audit right now and Autodesk is pushing us to upgrade our licenses as part of the audit. Can you assist in an audit?”

[26:39] Linda: Absolutely. We have done, we’ve helped various different customers who are in the unfortunate situation of being through an audit, and it’s really interesting you know a lot of times when you get in these it’s really it’s an accident I mean we’ve seen all different scenarios. But we can absolutely assist you in an audit even if you’re not using the Open iT solution right now. Our consulting and our business analyst can help you understand what’s going on in the environment and assist you with recommendations. To again correct that audit you know if there’s a deficiency, if you will to correct that but not to overspend right, so there’s all different strategies that’s kind of an open-ended question because literally, every single customer is different, but we can absolutely help so I’d suggest you can book send us an email, or you can book on the website and we can talk more specific about your individual situation.

[27:54] Mae: Great question. Thank you so much, Linda and to all of our attendees for joining our webinar today. 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 together with Linda’s presentation earlier. Since this is a webinar series, let me take the chance to invite you to our last webinar session on April 28th. Deep dive into your Autodesk Portfolio. You can register through the link shown on the screen or visit the Open iT LinkedIn page to add this event on your calendar, if you have additional questions for this session or for the last session. You can simply send it through optimizeautodesk@openit.com Once again, thank you very much, Linda for gracing this webinar, and to everyone who has participated, thank you very much. We will see you again on our last session. Once again, this is Mae your host for today. Thank you and stay safe!

[28:45] Linda: Thank you everybody, have a great day!