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LAMUM vs. In-House Scripts & Tools

For most engineering companies worldwide, the cost of engineering software licenses is the second largest overhead expense they face. Despite the considerable investment spent on these licenses, their management and monitoring is usually done via in-house scripts or tools.

Managing engineering software licenses in-house can cost companies tremendous resources, as well as staff hours and infrastructure that could be allocated to the company’s core functionality. Apart from the opportunity – and financial – cost, these in-house tools often struggle to provide accurate and actionable data that helps companies maximize the efficiency of their licenses. In-house scripts also need to be regularly updated and debugged to ensure their functionality, costing even more staff hours.

You can learn more about LAMUM’s best-in-class functionality, and how it helps the world’s largest engineering firms save 15-25% on their engineering software license costs by contacting our sales team and requesting a demo today!

8 Best Practices for Successful Software License Management

Engineering organizations put different spins on what’s important for managing their software and license usage.  They claim current methods are adequate, yet they fall short and are inefficient. License Asset Manager with Usage Monitoring (LAMUM) focuses on best practices for engineering software license management and monitoring for efficiency.

Centralized Repository for Asset Information

Often overlooked is consolidating asset information. LAMUM features provides this best practice and combined with license usage monitoring and managing for efficiency is the ideal solution to deploy more best practices! Understanding current usage with visibility of historical trends is essential, and best to have asset information ready to reference for renewals, compliance, and audit-readiness.  Information like contacts, POs, invoices, SLAs, and cost can be maintained multiple ways.  That’s the problem!  Many disparate methods like spreadsheets, documents, and hardcopies maintaining this information is impractical.  It’s not easily accessible by all and difficult to find auditable items.

Knowing What You Pay For

is essential and many have a good idea of what they own for software including seats, cost, usage restrictions, and expirations. Count on the all-in-1 solution that has all asset information and attachments combined with the license file data ingested by LAMUM to facilitate reconciliation of what you pay for.

Proactively Prepare for Renewals

Don’t wait for your vendor to contact you.  Get started 45-60 days in advance by refencing LAMUM expiration reports and email alerts.  There’s ample license information and usage trends to properly prepare and determine what you need.  Be proactive and prepared for contract and license renewals!

Prepare for the Budget Cycle

Just as valuable as renewal information is historical usage to analyze trends, peaks, and ultimately determine what you may need for the next budget cycle.  Knowing what you pay for, knowing what you’re using, and knowing what you need for renewals and budgets is critical.  Viewing logs and in-house scripts are no match for data-driven analytics for historical perspective on new product introduction license needs.

Current Checkouts and License Harvesting

Customers say that the usage stat command or GUI is adequate.  Yes, but can they display a single pane of all active tools with details that include checkout duration to sort by long checkouts, ability to send warnings and alerts for long checkouts that may be idle, a hyperlinked username to display LDAP information, and even harvest the license from that long checkout?  Deploy a best practice solution and not the less than adequate method.

Comprehensive Usage Reporting

Viewing a log is not efficient and reporting shouldn’t be an extra option and cost for the engineering software license management solution.  Software license management best practices require features that provide current and historical reports with selectable criteria that can be saved for on-demand or batch reporting to be used in an instant or generated for future software license usage review.  A web-based user interface replaces client installations with URLs to be repurposed as hyperlinks

Alerts and Notifications for License Management

– Reports provide perspective to make decisions for license capacity.  As much as you’d like to be prepared for the unexpected through data analysis, you need reactive and proactive notification.  Alerts help isolate capacity issues to quell user frustration.  Proactive notification of capacity and denials thresholds help to identify license abuse.  Expiration alerts provide ample notice to secure license renewals in time.  Daemon-down alerts enable fast response before impacting productivity on a larger scale.

Cost Savings and ROI with Efficient License Management

Our mantra is “know what you pay for, know what you’re using, know what you need.”  The focus for many is on simply having more than enough licenses to avoid denials and impact on productivity and revenue vs managing for efficiency and cost savings. License administrators view current usage to determine how many licenses are used vs capacity and overlook licenses not used. It’s not surprising to see a huge gap between them.  What a great opportunity for cost savings when I see license capacity of 150 when trends show the most licenses used is 46.  Do the math on cost per license and potential savings to appreciate the ROI for a solution like LAMUM. 

Request a demo today for LAMUM, the TeamEDA engineering software license management system!

FAQs

We’re using many ways to capture our engineering software asset information, but mostly using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.  Can the information in the spreadsheets be transferred into LAMUM?

License asset information can be entered manually for each specific line item: Vendor, Tool, PO, Server, Daemon, and License which ties each line item together. To transfer data for many assets, CSV templates in the proper format for import are downloadable from LAMUM to populate with the required and optional information to be imported into LAMUM.  Existing Microsoft spreadsheets could be cross-referenced or reformatted in the proper format.  Many assets to be configured for usage monitoring can be imported, too.

What’s the value of LAMUM when our vendors provide a GUI at no extra cost that shows current licenses checked out already?

LAMUM provides much more than current license usage and in much more detail than the vendors.  Consider a single pane to view all current license usage at once and understanding licenses in use vs capacity, as well as the severity or threat of exceeding capacity. Add alerts to that to be proactive in policing long checkout abuse and replenishing the pool of licenses.

How do you correlate compliance and audit-readiness between asset information and license usage?

The license asset information and up to eighteen (18) documents provide necessary compliance and audit-readiness information to reference with your vendor.  Through Active Directory (LDAP) synchronization, LAMUM can capture pertinent information for the usernames checking out licenses relative to location to reference to ensure that engineering groups are adhering to license restrictions.

Can you explain cost savings opportunities and ROI with LAMUM?

With LAMUM cost savings is much more than just reducing the number of licenses needed to save money.  We look at reducing license counts, preventing further spend through efficient usage, consolidating methods to maintain license information and usage, and reducing labor costs for to manage the engineering software license usage and monitoring for efficiency. You’ll save on all fronts and easily absorb the cost of LAMUM within the available software spend cap.

When we run out of licenses for our FlexLM software, we just do lmremove to check licenses back in.  Why is LAMUM better for license harvesting?

LAMUM doesn’t just focus on current usage statistics.  It calculates duration of use for licenses currently checked out to identify long checkouts and potentially long checkout abuse.  For FlexLM, we can REMOVE a license to check it back in, but our best practice is to assess long durations, use long checkout warnings and alerts to change behavior, and using the username’s Active Directory information to identify the email or phone number to attempt to contact the user to check the license back in if idle for another user to use.

Combating License Abuse

License abuse is one of the hidden perils of floating software licenses, costing companies enormous amounts of money without them realizing it. Imagine – A well-meaning engineer needs to work on various projects through out the day, but is worried from previous experience where their work’s been delayed because a license wasn’t available when it was needed.

To the engineer the solution seems straightforward – after their morning cup of coffee, they check out the licenses they need for the day, leaving them open on their computer for them to use at their leisure. Before clocking out at the end of the day, the license are returned, and the engineer had the license available whenever they needed it through out the day.

But what if every engineer had the same bad behavior? And what about those engineers that can’t check out a license all day, as they’re sitting idle – but unavailable to others – on a colleague’s computer.

License abuse from a few engineers has an outsized impact through out the organization. Other engineers face license denials, as licenses are checked out and unavailable for them to use. Line managers face delays in their projects, as their engineers can’t access the licenses they need to complete their work.

With engineers and managers reporting licenses are unavailable when needed, companies are compelled to buy more licenses, skewing budgets and further increasing already expensive software license costs.

Proactive monitoring of your engineering tools can help you crack down on license abuse, making sure engineers have the licenses they need available when they need it, but also that they return it once their finished with it. LAMUM’s unparalleled visibility into your current and historical license usage allows you to do exactly that.

Our interactive 24/7 Activity Reports allow you to easily visualize and track usage and checkout patterns, including checkout durations. Additionally, automatic, customizable alerts let you crack down on license usage in real-time, with a multitude of automatic alert options, including Long Check-Out Warnings for checkouts exceeding a certain duration r sent to the user in question, as well as the license administrator.

LAMUM’s tools allow engineering companies across the world  to crack down on license abuse by their staff members. In doing so, they’re able to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their engineers, eliminate license denials and save up to 15-25% each year on their costly engineering tools.

Are you ready to crack down on license abuse from your engineers?

Software License Management’s Role Enabling Business Growth

As companies grow – either organically or through mergers and acquisitions, staying on top of license needs for engineering tools becomes increasingly difficult. Whether you’re bringing new tools into your software license landscape, or working with the same tools on separate license agreements, the complexity of managing expensive software licenses grows with every new team, tool or location you’re adding.

Proactive management and monitoring of your engineering software licenses can help you stay on top of rapidly shifting teams and projects. With teams realigning or relocating and shifting resources, it’s crucial to centralizing disparate license information and documentation to ensure compliance with license usage agreements and that you’re fully aware of all the tools available to your teams.

Similarly, understanding both historical and real-time usage of features and tools ensures every engineer has access to the tool they need, when they need it, without the company paying for a surplus of unused features or licenses.

As the number and location of engineers, the number of teams and the number of tools being utilized grows – often in large sudden bursts, staying on top of this becomes a more daunting task than ever. Without streamlined reporting on usage, it’s impossible to make the investments and optimizations needed.

TeamEDA’s LAMUM  tackles all of this and much more! Our unparalleled functionality  allows engineers, IT teams, license administrators and managers to understand and optimize usage for all leading software vendor and daemon management tools.

One of our clients, a technology company based in California, highlighted just how valuable TeamEDA is in helping manage the growth process. Starting with 125 users working on the development of one of their consumer electronic products, they evangelized and quickly brought more teams and divisions onboard, swelling to almost 600 users!

Realizing the value of the tool, the company chose to shift their entire hardware engineering group, responsible for the development of consumer products and IT infrastructure, over to LAMUM. In doing so, they were able to ensure their engineers could maximize productivity while minimizing license expenses.

How a management change at your Software Vendor impacts you

A change is afoot in the engineering software industry, with semiconductor EDA software vendor Synopsys announcing a $35 billion acquisition of simulation, CFD and analysis software vendor Ansys. The deal could set the stage for a wave of mergers and acquisitions as software vendors compete to consolidate. But what does this mean for the engineers using their tools? And the companies that buy them?

A change in management can lead to an increase in software audits and compliance checks on licenses, as the new management make sure their customers are following their agreements. Even without a change in management, in the last few years, there are reports of software vendors increasing compliance checks and audits.

Do you have a system in place so that every team in every department using an engineering tool knows exactly what the rules and restrictions for it’s usage are?

Even if you’re fully compliant, a change in management at one of your software vendors can mean a change in features packages and pricing, or just tougher renewal negotiations. New bundle deals on features, usage tiers and other changes can throw the average user’s budget into chaos, with costs skyrocketing as you struggle to figure out what you need.

To stay ahead of it all, you need visibility into your software assets. You need to know what you own, and the fine print of its license agreement, to make sure your company is fully compliant. But you also need to know what you’re using – who’s using a tool, where they’re using it, how long they’re using it for and what features they’re using. It’s only with this level of usage data that you can make sure you’re not paying for features or licenses you don’t need.

TeamEDA makes sure you have all of this. LAMUM’s reports enable you to track real-time and historical usage data, checkout duration, and counts. Interactive graphs, gauges and customizable dashboards let you visualize key trends for all your features and tools, providing you with complete visibility on what you own, what you’re using, and what you need.  The streamlined and agile front-end provides seamless engineering Software License Management which includes the ability to add those digital agreements, quotes, PO’s, invoices, and more.

Leveraging your data, our team can make sure you’re fully on top of your license usage, so that you enter your software contract negotiations armed with the insights you need. Using LAMUM, customers save up to 15-25% every year on their annual spend for engineering software.

Are you ready to drive the best deal?

The LAMUM NX1.0 Experience

By Paul Riviere – Head of Sales, TeamEDA

It’s here!  LAMUM NX1.0, the next generation of LAMUM, has launched.

With a new look and feel to the user interface, making It sleeker and more agile, LAMUM NX1.0 is ready to address your engineering Software License Management (SLM) needs. LAMUM NX1.0 enables you to  maintain a keen eye on your engineering software license usage through:

  • Real-time usage tables
  • Historical charts
  • Denials reporting
  • Alerts
  • and all-in-1 features for reports, exports, and much more.

I’ve been running my customer demonstrations on LAMUM NX1 for a couple of months and I have to tell you that the user experience is incredible!  The seamless navigation between SLM with License Asset Manager (LAM) and Real-time views of usage details in Usage Monitor (UM) is a snap.  This is truly one tool with everything you need for a comprehensive view, with trends and peak analysis to boot.

The demonstrations get really interesting when I listen to a customer’s use case and quickly demonstrate in LAMUM how we can take a closer look at the situation.  For example, customers jump through hoops to identify usage vs capacity for features of tools.  It’s not at their fingertips, and it takes a couple of hops through a remote desktop, then a usage stat command, and perhaps some mental math.

With LAMUM, it’s a quick click at a Current Overview Table of active features or a simple gauge display that quickly highlights licenses used vs capacity, with the ability to drill down into usage details.  It’s impressive how quickly they view the answer to usage vs capacity, and this is just the tip of the iceberg of how LAMUM can help system administrators manage and monitor their engineering software landscape.

Paul Riviere is TeamEDA’s Head of Sales, with 20+ years of experience developing high-performance computer solutions for engineering and scientific research organizations and now optimizing their engineering software licenses. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or via email

TeamEDA Releases LAMUM NX1.0

We’re proud to announce the release of LAMUM NX1.0, the next generation of engineering software license management and monitoring. Leveraging our License Asset Manager with Usage Monitoring (LAMUM)’s best-in-class functionality and reporting power, LAMUM NX1.0 is a faster, more agile and more secure tool for engineers to organize and optimize their expensive software licenses.

With LAMUM NX1.0, IT managers and key decision-makers can quickly and easily view both key details on their software licenses, as well as current and historical usage in a single pane. This unparalleled look into licensed assets lets you maximize the use of your costly licenses, ensuring your engineers have the tools they need available when – and where – they need. Built entirely on the latest PHP 8.2.1, LAMUM NX1.0 also lets you run reports and track usage faster, in our most secure environment yet. You can learn more by reading our Release Notes for LAMUM NX1.0.

All existing TeamEDA customers with an annual subscription or annual maintenance agreement can upgrade to LAMUM NX1.0 through our easy download and installation process available here. More details about LAMUM NX1.0’s key features, as well as App Notes to help you make the most of your license management and monitoring experience are available on our Customer Portal.

If you’re interested in joining the world’s top engineering firms in saving time and money on their software license fees, Request a Demo of LAMUM NX1.0 today to find out if it’s right for you! TeamEDA customers have saved 15-25% each year on the cost of their engineering software, while ensuring their engineers have access to the tool they need, when they need it.

Zero-Usage Reports

The biggest challenge for CAD/IT administrators is discovering licenses that are under-utilized or have zero-usage over several months. Running a report that shows a number of licenses that have not been used in the last 365 days, is a clear indication that you may want to negotiate a trade-in or even to stop paying maintenance!

It is certainly important to talk about what is being used, how much, by whom, etc. But it is equally important to look at what is not being used. The Zero Usage report does just that. It shows all features/tools that were not used in a specified period of time.

Managers need to know what is not being used as well as what is.

Managers need to consider the best ways to make decisions about:

  • Cost allocations and overall Engineering expenditure
  • Intelligent use of engineering resources
  • Spending restrictions
  • Resource distribution

Learn more about reports.

Discovering under-utilized or zero-use licenses

Batch Reports for Engineering Licenses

Would you like to receive regular reports (every week, once a month, once a quarter, etc.)? LAMUM will automatically create these for you in the middle of the night, and either send to you via email or deliver to a specific folder.

Setting up a Batch report in LAMUM is very easy:
  • Create the report you want and select the time period you would like to analyze (7 days for Weekly, 30 days for Monthly, etc.).
  • Click Create Batch Report, give the Report a User-friendly name.
  • Choose how you want it delivered: email or specified folder. That’s it!

There is no limit on how many Batch Reports you can set up.

Batch Reports can be:
  • Single reports (graphs or tables)
  • Multiple graphs for single tool
  • Selected Features Usage Graphs by Tag
  • Selected Features Usage Tables by Tag
    • Includes all User Details

(Tag is user-friendly name for port@host)

Feature Usage by Tag – Table/Graph

(A “set” of Graphs or Tables for selected Tools)

Allows you to Create Batch Reports for “ALL” or “Specific features” usage details for a given Tag and Time period.

  • A “set” of graphs for selected tools at a given tag
  • A “set” of tables for selected tools at a given tag
  • Created weekly, monthly, or quarterly, e-mailed or dropped in a folder

(Tag is a user-friendly name for port@host)

Multi-graph View Select

(A “set” of up to 8 Graphs, for same Tool)

The Multi-graph view is a batch report that provides a complete and comprehensive set of usage graphs for each daemon.

It may include a combination of up to 8 graphs, such as:

  • Heatmap (Checkouts)
  • Heatmap (Denials)
  • Top 10 Users (by count or time of checkout)
  • History graph
  • Concurrent use graph (24×7)
  • Concurrent use graph (M-F 8-5)
  • Group Usage
  • Unique Users Graph

These can be individual or combined and scheduled weekly, monthly or however preferred. This routine report is available as a downloadable .pdf that can be easily shared with the team or management.

Mergers, Acquisitions & Staffing Changes: Are You Ready?

Right now is a critical time for many companies to make crucial decisions about acquisitions, mergers and changes in staffing. As organizations are thinking about ways to move forward, it is becoming increasingly important to consider what engineering licenses are needed.

  • How many CAD, EDA, PLM or any other engineering licenses do you currently have?
  • What are the future needs and expectations?
  • How will mergers and acquisitions affect your engineering team?
  • How do you manage the different engineering licenses across the various groups?
  • Did your company need to furlough engineering employees or are you currently in the exciting stage of needing to hire more talent?

With the recent increase of both acquisitions and mergers, it can be a two-fold challenge at times. Corporate companies want to make sure that the companies they are investing have a system to manage all of their engineering licenses for greater visibility and transparency. The smaller companies are trying to learn how to show compliance, learn corporate structures and best ways to enter a new way of working.

In some larger companies, training departments are in charge of ensuring new colleagues are aware of the tools that the teams are using as well as ensuring that the employees are aware of the product suite available to them. They also oversee that these tools are used in compliance. Check out our overview of how LAMUM can be useful across the different job functions.

Ultimately, the training departments need to have a good idea of utilization, especially during the current ongoing pandemic. Managers could really see big savings here.

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