Saturday, June 16, 2007

Where and how to get the cheapest ESRI ArcGIS licenses in the world?

An interesting idea from OpenlLM - buy your next licenses by using OpenLM for license management instead of spending a lot of money on additional licenses. The idea is that in most of the cases the exiting licenses are not fully utilized so OpenLM can really double license usage.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Wrong floating license confuguration

I had a conversation today with an IT manager that has 60 floating licenses with users distributed in 6 sites, all working on the same network. Guess what is the configuration...
Sure, 6 flexlm license managers, one for each site. Each user can only access the dedicated licenses on his site. Can you believe that?

I think the reason that organizations use this configuration is that the license manager do not supply the tools the user need in order to manage the licenses. When you have ten license for a site you can walk to a user workstation, log him out and release the license. When you are on the WAN it's a real problem.

I recommended this organization to put all the licenses on one floating license manager and use OpenLM to help system managers in management tasks.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Expert in a product licensed by a floating license? you can make money!

OpenLM floating license published an open API that allow developers to add OpenLM support to to the product they are experts in. There are more then 2500 software vendors that use Macrovision FLEXnet (Globetrotter FLEXlm) as a floating license manager and all of them can be supported by OpenLM.
OpenLM open API is very simple to implement and the extension the developer created will be sold in OpenLM site. Most of the revenues from the product will be transfered by OpenLM to the developer.

5 minutes install for OpenLM

A new quick install guide was published on the OpenLM site. The quick guide list the most critical steps in order to install OpenLM server and client in 5 minutes. OpenLM is a floating license managers that allow organization to save money on floating licenses by minimizing the idle time of the software to minimum.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Advanced features in FLEXlm - Borrowing Licenses

FLEXlm version 9.2 introduced the feature of borrowing licenses. The purpose of this action is to allow user to temporarily take license from the server to another workstation. After that period the license will only be used on the network.
The length of the time that a license can be borrowed is determined by the software vendor. You can check if you can borrow licenses by checking the license file. Each FEATURE line that has a BORROW=X on it indicates that this license key can be borrowed for a maximum of X hours. If you do not see BORROW=X as part of the FEATURE line, that license key cannot be borrowed. By default, the maximum number of hours is set to 4380 (6 months) when Tripos generates the license file.
OpenLM support the borrow feature of FLEXlm.

OpenLM floating license optimization

This interesting movie shows how OpenLM save expensive licenses by closing inactive applications.
OpenLM is making floating licenses really effective, while without it, it very hard to make an effective use in this technology. ArcView is the most simple product of the GIS giant ESRI. ArcInfo is the most advanced software in the industry and it is also a member of this family of products.


licensing debate - real case

Found this on Digg - A very comprehensive article about floating licenses in a real oorganization. Original article is here

Floating licensing lost it's primary position in the software industry since the resent move towards remote application. In the field of GIS many organizations and users still use GIS desktop products so this issue is still relevant.
The most interesting part of the article is the part that calculates the idle time of the software. I was surprised by the numbers!
I think that this organization represents many other organization in many other fields.
While you cannot do this "hour"counting in any case I feel that it's true in many cases.
The combination of floating licensing and OpenLM can save organization big money!

How do floating licenses work?

A license manager keeps a pool of floating licenses. Users can activate the software by using floating licenses from the pool. The pool of licenses determine how many users can work at the same time - if 10 licenses are available then only 10 users are able to work concurrently. User number 11 will not be able to get use of a license until one of the first 10 users will exit the software. The concept of "floating license" is good for companies that buy software since they can use the same license on many workstations and by many users simultaneously. For this reason floating licenses are much more expensive than node locked licenses, usually 3 times the price of a node locked license.
While the concept of floating licenses is very good, the implementation is not complete. Several problems do not let organizations utilize the benefits of floating licenses to the max and in many cases they pay a lot more per license but finally retreat to use it like a node locked license.