This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

HELP! – Bentley‘s software licensing policies?

HELP!

Is your company a victim of Bentley‘s software licensing policies?

We used to be happy with the SELECT subscription‘s Trust
Licensing program until about two and a half years ago when we learned about the
„bucket method“ of license usage (see attached file „What is usage and how is it calculated.pdf“ in zip) and what it
meant for us.

At this time, two and a half years ago and ever since,
Bentley has repeatedly demanded that we buy more licenses since our „buckets“ have
overflowed.  Since we felt that we were
not using the software that much,  we examined
the records stored on the SELECTserver user login to see what the actual usage
was.  We looked at every new record for a
day, each of which meant that a license was being pulled out of the pool, and
its Stop Time to see how many licenses were being used at the same time.  We found out that we were only using the
licenses we had bought and paid SELECT subscription fees for.  Attached is a study for one day  („Efla - Application Usage By Hour -
27-05-2013.xlsx“ in zip), one of many we have reviewed.

We own 10 PowerDraft licenses (also 10 MicroStation, 2
InRoads, 1 Geopack and 1 Bentley Building Mechanical Systems license) and for
this particular day we only used a maximum of 10 licenses simultaneously.

Alas,  Bentley does
not allow us to use our licenses in this way! 
Instead, they count the licenses being used „within the hour“ so they
count 16 licenses being used on this particular day instead of 10.  So if someone uses a license in such a way
that use starts one minute before the hour or ends one minute after the hour,
12-14% of the license working day is lost. 
If someone uses a license for 10 minutes and use happens to straddle the
hour, 21-24% of the license working day is lost.  And this might happen more than once per day.

For this Bentley is asking for 17% of the cost of a license
as a SELECT subscription fee, which is more than most other vendors ask for
(10-15%) for similar or better services. 

Why are we not allowed to use every license we have
purchased every second?  In our case
Bentley wants us to own MORE than 10
licenses so we can use 10 licenses without overfilling the „buckets“.  That is a hefty overhead they want us to pay.  Bentley‘s Trust Licensing has gotten a whole
new sinister meaning.

Is it only us?  Have
you looked at your true usage for your overflowing „buckets“ (or your peaks)?  Have you had to pay for more licenses in
order to keep the „buckets“ from overflowing even though your true usage has
been much less?  Please share your
experiences.  What is your „bucket“ usage
vs. the true usage?  Our max is 16 vs. 10.  For this Bentley wants us to suffer, i.e. for
the way we use our licenses.

We don‘t think it‘s fair that you can‘t use your
licenses every second of the working day in any way you like without paying a premium
for extra licenses that you don‘t use. 
Every other vendor we know of allows you to use your licenses every
second of the day.

Is your company a victim of Bentleys software licensing policies.zip
  • I'm not understanding this 'trust' system and I'm sure that is not how our licences are managed. As far as I know our usage is by the day not hour, If you start a program in the morning and then close and restart in the afternoon that is just one usage.

  • There is a very good Understanding, Monitoring and Managing Usage blog article related to this that was posted recently and is very much worth reading.

      

  • My native language may not be English but I do understand what the term „concurrent“ means and it has nothing to do with intervals.  How is software and SELECT pricing related to such an interval?  Do you mean that if it were one second (on a par with the competition) we would have to pay 1.6x $3000 = $4800 for a PD license (twice that for MS)?  Good luck selling it for that price.  It is probably better for everyone if Bentley raised the price a little and changed this interval to a second so that every company can use their licenses "concurrently" instead of them not knowing how many licenses they have to buy in order to use a certain number of licenses without the "buckets" overflow.

    What do you mean exactly by "Bentley has measured software usage by our users on SELECT versus those who are not and have found that hourly pooling equates to 50% more users with the same number of licenses"?  Do you have this backwards?  In our case hourly pooling equates to 60% more users for the same number of licenses over the concurrent usage.  This is a tremendous value for Bentley, which is the point I'm making in my forum post, and we the users are paying for it.  Ingenous way to sell more licenses some of which are not being used.

    The second paragraph sounds like Bentley is providing a service nobody wants.  Why are we paying for such a service?

  • Unknown said:

    There is a very good Understanding, Monitoring and Managing Usage blog article related to this that was posted recently and is very much worth reading.

    This blog appears to be just about trust licencing, and not how our licences are managed. Why is there a difference?

  • Thanks for sharing moharr.  This little basic program of yours seem like a good thing to have for users to study their records as I suggested in my forum post.  I agree with you on the one-hour "bucket" being a bit too coarse it costing up to 24% of the license working time each time it's "poorly" used.  I don't have anything against the counting method, only the length of the interval.  I think a one minute would be good length of the interval which is 60 times longer than their competition is using.  Having it one hour then yes it should be a good argument for a higher valid overuse than what Bentley seems to be using.  It's not like we have been "stealing" anything from Bentley but rather the other way around.  Why does Bentley allow some companies to use their licenses 100% of the time (users using them all day long) but not our company because we use it in a different way during the day?  We are paying the same fees.