Most license optimization work happens at the pool level. Organizations look at total utilization, identify excess capacity, and adjust the pool size at renewal. This approach recovers real value. However, it does not recover all available value. That’s because it treats all users within a pool as interchangeable.
They are not. Within a 60-seat CAD license pool, there are engineers who run the tool continuously throughout the day, engineers who use it for two hours in the morning and switch to other work, engineers who access it occasionally for review and markup tasks, and engineers who have access because they once needed it and nobody removed them. Each of those usage patterns justifies a different license type, often at significantly different price points.
The User Classification Problem
Before matching license types to users, you need to know how your users actually behave. Most organizations do not have this data at any useful level of granularity. They know who has access to a tool. They do not know how often each user accesses it, for how long, with what feature intensity, or whether their usage pattern has changed since they were provisioned.
The absence of user-level data is precisely why most organizations provision full commercial licenses for everyone who might need a tool. Named-user license monitoring or user-level monitoring changes this by providing the behavioral data needed to classify each user accurately. A practical classification model works in three tiers:
Power users: Engineers who use the tool regularly, often daily, with high feature utilization across the full scope of the licensed capabilities. These users need full commercial access. Restricting their license type creates productivity friction that outweighs any cost saving.
Standard users: Engineers who use the tool several times per week, with moderate feature utilization. They need functional access but may not require every capability in a premium bundle. In EDA environments specifically, many standard users draw on fewer than half the features included in their current license tier.
Casual users: Engineers who access the tool infrequently, for design reviews, sign-offs, markups, or occasional reference, and use a narrow set of basic features. In most engineering software environments, viewer-only or limited-feature licenses exist at substantially lower cost than full commercial seats.
What the Data Shows in Practice
The user details report in Agent Monitor maps individual consumption against the license pool – total checkouts, session duration, last access date, and chargeback percentage. Run against a full user list, this report typically reveals a distribution where a core of heavy users accounts for the majority of consumption, a larger group of moderate users follows, and a tail of occasional users collectively represents significant licensed capacity but generates minimal actual usage.
In named-user license environments, this tail is especially significant because every seat in the tail is a fixed annual cost rather than a draw on a shared pool. An engineer who accessed a named-user seat four times in the past year, for an average session of 22 minutes, is carrying a full annual license to enable roughly 88 minutes of annual usage.
The License Type Matching Process
Once users are classified by actual usage behavior, the matching process becomes systematic:
1. Power users stay on current licenses. Do not optimize the core sers who depend on full capability. The productivity cost of under-resourcing power users is real and immediate.
2. Standard users get reviewed against bundle composition. Compare which features each standard user actually invokes against which features are included in the bundle. If a large portion of users consistently draw on fewer than half the licensed features, the bundle may be right-sized for power users but over-specified for the standard population.
3. Casual users get migrated to appropriate tiers. Most major engineering software vendors offer viewer, limited-access, or read-only tiers. Autodesk’s product line includes viewer access for many tools. Siemens NX and other Tier 1 CAD platforms have reviewer licenses at reduced cost. EDA vendors typically offer lower-tier access for design sign-off and review functions.
4. Inactive users get removed. Users who have not accessed a license in 90 days or more are not casual users. Removing them from the license roster is the most straightforward optimization available and requires no vendor conversation.
If you want to see your own user distribution before your next renewal, Agent Monitor’s user-level details and group details reports give you that picture from existing data. The classification often does the persuasion work on its own.
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