Altair Solutions for Software and License Management
Enterprises invest in costly software to enable their engineers and designers to innovate, solve critical challenges, and ultimately create products that can change the world. When licenses account for large chunks of IT and engineering budgets, managing them efficiently is critical. The best software and license management solutions are designed to handle the software files themselves, from the IT control center, and day-to-day operations. They enhance visibility and track usage so organizations can effectively share licenses within set parameters, get insights into utilization, identify waste and checkouts, and take advantage of both real-time and historical analytics.
Successful software and license management solutions equip IT administrators with insight into how effectively expensive licenses are used within their organization. License managers help IT procurement teams budget effectively because they collect utilization reports; managers will know if they’re spending unnecessarily by buying too many licenses or slowing productivity by buying too few. Within an optimized system, licenses are always at work, minimizing delays in the product development life cycle.
Why Trust Software Asset Management?
Budget Efficiently
The right license management tools can keep you from wasting time by underspending and wasting money by overspending on the critical — but expensive — licenses teams need to succeed. Software management tools give you insight into real-time and historical usage to inform future budgeting.
Streamline Administration
From managing software files to an organization’s IT control center, license managers increase license-sharing efficiency across teams. Successful software and license management solutions are vendor-agnostic, offering organizations flexibility and independence. You can future-proof with confidence using predictive features included in license tracking tools.
Strengthen Operations
Software and license management empowers IT managers and procurement with the tools to right-size resources, set sharing hierarchies and policies, and get insight into usage, checkouts, waste, and more. License managers also make software usage audits smooth with detailed logs. With optimized policies in place, you can mitigate lag time and ensure users can access the resources they need.
Enterprise Software License Management Guide
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Where Are Software and License Management Solutions Successful?
Software plays a critical role in every industry, creating a need for software and license management solutions. Anywhere software is used extensively can benefit from using these tools. In small, straightforward environments, engineering teams and IT administrators may rely on a workload manager to schedule compute work based on licenses. However, as team size increases, so does the demand for resources, which makes incorporating a license manager the smart choice.
In electronic design automation (EDA), licenses are both expensive and vital. Manufacturing, engineering, and other industries must shift quickly between different tools to design, test, and measure for product optimization. In every industry, the ability to share licenses without compromising productivity or efficiency can reduce time to market by mitigating lost time throughout the product development process.
Products for Software and License Management
Altair® Allocator™
Allocator enables sharing of software licenses among multiple job scheduling servers spread across multiple geographical sites and business units, leading to increased efficiency in license utilization.
Altair® Monitor™
Monitor is a license tracking tool that lets users and administrators get real-time insight into software license availability, usage, job status, and more.
Altair® Software Asset Optimization (SAO)
SAO is our advanced tool for software asset optimization, built so you can right-size your organization’s software portfolio using real data to make informed business decisions.
Who Benefits from Software Asset Management?
IT Managers and Procurement
Knowledge is a powerful advantage. IT teams need to keep track of license expirations, vendor management, and legal compliance, all while staying on budget. License trackers deliver accurate, actionable information to empower IT managers and procurement.
End Users
Software asset management tools democratize resources. These solutions, while automated and automatic, also acknowledge the human component. Users can see who has checked out the license they need and can work with team members to get access.
Corporate Information Officer
License management tools contribute to an optimized design environment, positively impacting productivity and budgeting. As licenses are shared and used as efficiently as possible, design and engineering teams can tighten the product design life cycle, delivering a safe, reliable, innovative product.
Featured Resources
License-first Scheduling with Heterogeneous Schedulers and Altair Accelerator
Batch systems often don't work well with complex chip design workloads. This paper covers the common problem of getting high utilization with software license resources and shows you how to use Altair Accelerator and Altair Monitor to execute license-aware scheduling – even if you're stuck with legacy or hardware-centric batch systems.
Powerhouse License Monitoring - Advantages Over In-House Tools
Managing software licenses efficiently is crucial for organizations that want to optimize costs and ensure compliance. In-house license monitoring solutions can initially be economical, but they come with challenges including slow performance, maintenance overhead, and scalability problems as license demand grows. In addition, in-house tools may not integrate seamlessly with job schedulers, and allocating resources for the development and maintenance of in-house tools may not be cost-effective compared to using commercial solutions. The Altair® Monitor™ license monitoring and management solution lets users and administrators get real-time insight into software license availability, usage, status, and expiry. Monitor uses current and historical data to help optimize license spending and utilization for organizations of any size — including large, multisite environments.
Effective Techniques for Managing High Cost Software Licenses
Distilling over 20 years of customer experience in managing software licenses in the chip design space, Stuart Taylor, Altair, will present some common techniques to reduce waste and more accurately target spend. While the information was gleaned in the semiconductor space, the experience can be applied to other industry sectors. We will take a tour of the typical activities associated with day-to-day license operations, surviving a software audit and planning future purchases. Altair's Monitor product is used as a basis for the tour but the ideas are generally applicable; a working assumption is that the licenses are expensive and are a scarce resource with multiple teams and users competing for access.
Presented as part of Altair's 2023 Future.Industry conference.
Save 20% on your Engineering Software License Costs with Altair SAO
Altair SAO solution enables you to visualize and analyze global software inventories and utilization rates across facilities, divisions, departments, and users. With SAO, it's easy to pinpoint underutilized expensive software assets and optimize their usage. Information from SAO can be used for better business planning and forecasting of engineering software.
