If you are a business owner or manager, you know that software asset management is a critical part of your business success. Software can be very expensive, and lack of control and understanding of how your software licenses are being used can negatively impact decision making.
X-Formation's License Statistics is a web-based application that provides detailed license usage reporting, helping you gain control over your IT asset management and improve your company business operations and profitability. Supporting almost 20 license managers, License Statistics provides more software tracking flexibility than any other tool on the market. In addition, it's easy to install and configure, and has an intuitive user interface accessible from a web browser from any location in the world.
Why monitoring software licenses is important
One of the biggest challenges companies are faced with is managing licenses from vendors such as Autodesk, MSC, or lmgrd, which use floating licensing. With floating licensing there is a license server which manages license checkouts. Sometimes users are denied access to particular applications. This happens when all licenses have been checked out. That is a very undesirable situation, because if a user cannot get his license, he simply cannot do his work. Although the next step could be to approach management and make a request to purchase more licenses, it would be more efficient to use License Statistics and gather information to answer the following questions:
- how many licenses are available?
- which applications are being used most?
- who has been using licenses and for how long?
- who has been denied access to a license?
- how many denials were there and when did they occur?
With the above information, one can now make a solid justification for the need to purchase more licenses. On the other hand, License Statistics can also help discover that there may be more licenses than necessary, meaning that the company is overspending on purchases and software renewals. Some of the key use cases of managing license usage with License Statistics are discussed in subsequent sections.