Are engineering managers complaining that they pay for licenses they don’t use in some regions? How are your cost alignments currently implemented and can a tool like LAMUM bring you greater visibility of engineering software?
Let’s talk licensing over geographic boundaries. For example; sharing CAD licenses from one office in the USA to another in Malaysia. Is this compliant with your Engineering Software license agreement?
The answer is generally NO. Each vendor has its own rules and restrictions and you MUST be aware of these to avoid compliance fines during license audits. Typically sharing between the Western Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere is banned, unless you pay to upgrade licenses to a GLOBAL license. Often sharing licenses between countries is also banned.
Are the maintenance costs distributed evenly between the subsidiaries (based on number of engineers, projects etc.)? Some companies are looking at centralizing licenses and having a billing policy based on the actual usage of licenses by each subsidiary (Read here about how centralization of licenses can help your organization).
This could entail understanding:
- Regions that use specific engineering software (countries, head offices for regions, where are the decisions made?)
- Are there subsidiaries under each region?
- How many license servers are there in each region?
- Which software do they manage?
- Is the utilization of some licenses higher than others?
- How does time and any other factors affect this?
Many of the software floating (concurrent) licenses are commonly known as FlexLM. Companies can install an unlimited number of seats of the software. The licenses are used concurrently are limited to a predefined number (i.e. set during the purchase).
Many organizations choose to centralize all licenses to a single license server will serve all users worldwide. This will help with greater transparency of total licenses for each software. Can all regions better manage available licenses this way and thus lead to a more balanced usage level?
Talk to our technical experts today, so we can answer any questions you have and help you optimize your engineering spend.
At TeamEDA, we help engineering companies optimize their engineering licenses. We are seeing organizations fail audits because CAD or EDA licenses were lent across geographic boundaries. Software audits are often primarily driven to raise income for software vendors through the form of license agreement compliance failures.
Running a global license can be far too expensive. LAMUM can help you lay the groundwork with your favorite vendor if global licensing or an extended licensing model is the only way to go. You’ll know exactly how many licenses you’ll need at each site in your organization.
Run a free 30-Day trial of our LAMUM solution today, to see if you would fail your vendor license agreement?