D&R announces the first "Smart Software License Manager" based on User Behavior Learning
Grenoble, France – February 27th, 2018
User profiling techniques "enhances the power of intelligent advisers for optimizing Software License purchase and corporate usage".
"Most enterprises are not aware of their real software requirements. As a result, they do not control corporate licensing expenses as well as they could:
- They may spend money renewing software licenses that are no longer in use
- They put the responsibility of acquiring software in the hands of their purchasing departments, which often do not have visibility into how an application is actually used within their enterprise
- They may spend money on software they did not need, and they never realize this because they fail to properly manage its usage after purchase."
The power of D&R Software License Manager in its early versions was to replace individually managed spreadsheet by an advanced management platform successfully integrating administrative and financial features. The overall goal being the reduction of license expenses and early clients claimed amazing expense reduction by using such a platform.
More recently in order to enhance the decision power and make well-informed business decisions, a monitoring system was fully integrated. Monitoring data (Big Data), reporting every minute about "who is using which tool", are compacted and interpreted in real time through configurable XML formatted dashboards. XML Formatting defines user behavior properties that are extracted in real time from the monitoring data and will be used by the advisers.
User profiling : What benefits?
In this new version "user profiling through behavioral properties" has been extended and exploited further. Usage frequency and duration of each user/group/project of any tool feature characterizes the user behavior (heavy user, users keeping license overnight, rare and short period user etc...). A user "profile" table displaying those properties is available for any period of time and can be exploited by the administrator.
An unlimited set of properties leading to advisers or optimization rules can be defined and configured by the administrator in the system.
Some features and advisers that have been successfully experienced are listed below
A first obvious application concerns the "pay per use" concept
- Automated cost sharing among "Cost Centers" based on usage percentage over a reference period is computed at any time.
- Pay per use scenario defines a usage cost as long as a cost is assigned a reference time slot / license feature.
- Cost per demand: As a reminder in a previous version it was shown that the system can grant license to cost center upon request and charge upon requested licenses.
- Calendar configuration identifying the working hours and excluding holidays is one of the intelligent features of the platform and is used to calculate accurately the average number of used licenses and also for abnormal usage detection
- One of the nightmare of managers is the fact that a user may keep a license overnight (or even during vacation!!!) without any real usage. Therefore not only the user is detected and tagged by a possible "misbehaving" attribute but also a real time alert can be emitted for an overnight usage asking for explanation and possible ask for releasing the license.
- Real time alerts emitted to the Admin if the peak of the number of licenses concurrently used has been reached several days of a week. It allows to plan (purchase or remix) actions and minimize denials.
It is quite hectic to provide floating licenses for a significant number of users while protecting heavy users or groups or critical projects through reserved seats
- Based on the usage profiling during a reference period , the system may detect the users who do not use their reserved seats and replaces them by heavy users who will benefit from reserved seat privileges. Automated or assisted remix procedure (with a verification step) can then be triggered to grant those seats to "needing" groups or users
- Request of tool licenses (possibly "package" of features) for a strategic task at a strategic period can be posted on the platform and the manager can trigger an automated remix procedure granting reserved seats to the users and "ejecting idle users" during the requested date.
Based on user profiling over a past period, the tool can define a number of "equivalent" "full time" users and give an approximate number of licenses that should be purchased for a smooth satisfaction of the users. Therefore a "Buy more" or "Buy less" adviser is emitted when a "Renew" or "Purchase more" process is envisioned.
"We follow this platform development for years. Integrating tightly user profiling makes a big difference and cost reduction brought by intelligent business decisions is significant." added Beny T. from Rafael Inc. an early architect of the platform.
"Learning User behavior when using web hosted Products is quite amazing... AI rules or advisers can be derived from this knowledge harvesting and lead to intelligent decisions which drastically optimize Purchase, Sales and Business strategy. This platform can certainly open many other applications" commented Gabrièle Saucier CEO D&R
For a web demo contact us.
This version will be demonstrated during D&R IP SoC 18 event in Santa Clara. Take appointment now.
D&R enterprise platform runs under any OS (Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX, Linux, HP, etc), supports all internet browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer) and any type of relational database (MySQL, ORACLE) and uses Java, WebServer (Jakarta-tomcat, WebSphere) and XML technology.
About Design And Reuse
Design & Reuse (D&R) was founded in 1997, the same year it launched its unique and renown IP web portal, www.design-reuse.com. D&R extended its scope by a companion site, www.design-reuse-embedded.com, for connecting system designers with vendors of subsystems, platforms, SoC Solutions... For 3 years a new connected site, www.design-reuse.cn, holds a Market Place dedicated to the Mandarin speaking IP SoC community.
D&R continues to maintain its focus on streamlining IP-based design with its Enterprise IP Management System (IPMS™), a next generation configurable Enterprise Java based platform offering the most innovative solution for internal and external IP management from design to reuse, to IP tracing in delivery and products etc... It includes unique powerful procurement features for external IPs (Finance reporting, Fee and royalty calculation).
For 5 years the platform has been extended to software license management. It incorporates a license monitoring Front End aiming at reducing License cost and offers powerful corporate financial reporting capabilities. Innovative user behaviour learning has been recently introducing to allow software license managers to add more intelligence in their decision-making process.
