Licensing / overuse or not

I'm having a kind of heated discussion with our new contacts in Denmark about overuse of software licenses, and would like to have a feedback from Bentley staff (or other users).

Our contact states that we are having a massive overuse of licenses and wants us to buy more licenses. According to him we are having 2 days overuse and he calculates that to 22% somehow.

In my opinion we do NOT have an overuse at all, but we have still more to go.

The average usage of licenses in this example is 1, while we do have 2 licenses. The average overusage is stated as 0 - no problem at all.

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  • Hi Andreas,

     

    First, I am glad to see the help file I wrote is being read (and quoted)!  There is an awful lot of information in there.  In particular, I created an entire section devoted to how usage is calculated and describes how the entire licensing mechanism works.  This is all found in the Introduction (and both its sub-sections) which I encourage you to read if you have not done so already.  As the second sentence in the Introduction points out, SELECTserver’s licensing paradigm is guided by the SELECT agreement.  The SELECT agreement is a topic you and your account manager should review together since it is exclusive to your company and Bentley.

     

    That said I would like to address the areas of the help file you have quoted and answer your questions as I see them.  On page 2 of your document, we see the MicroStation usage at the Bentley Hong Kong Office.  The chart shows that in April of 2012, there were 3 occasions usage was exceeded (and by very little).  I agree with your assessment that this example does not represent an account that is taking advantage of the program.  As such, I would not expect the account manager to discuss ways to mitigate TRUST usage in this case.

     

    Now, let’s talk about page 3.  In this example we see the Bentley Beijing Office is consistently using a large amount of MicroStation.  They own 25, however they often recording usage in the 30’s and in some cases more than 40 (it peaked at 45)!  Clearly we have TRUST usage and the question is how much.  The SELECT agreement states (and I am paraphrasing here, not quoting directly) that the number of uses in any interval shall not exceed the number of licenses owned.  The SELECTserver documentation defines the interval as a calendar hour.  One could conclude since the peak use recorded was 45, that the Beijing office should buy an additional 20 copies.  I think that would be harsh in this example since 40 was only breeched a handful of times.  However, if we look at how many times the Beijing office used more than 30 licenses, I define it as legitimate case of TRUST usage, since it happens often.

     

    Optimally, the scenario described on page 3 is extreme and the account manager will have likely been in contact with the account to suggest ways to mitigate TRUST usage.  For example, the green represents checked out licenses.  Are all 13 of those check outs necessary?  After several conversations and different attempts to rein in TRUST usage have failed, then the account manager would speak to the need of purchasing more licenses. 

     

    In this case, let’s assume the account manager has been in regular contact and the mitigation efforts have not worked completely.  We do see between 19 May and 30 June, usage is trending near the 30-35 mark (we assume for the sake of this example this is when mitigation efforts were in full force).  I would then expect the conversation between the account and the account manager to review their mitigation efforts along with their results and sync to the number found through this process. 

     

    The account manager would then present different programs such as Portfolio Balancing which allows the account to trade in underutilized products for products in need.  The benefit here is the account would not necessarily need to purchase more copies.

     

    I hope this helps, and please feel free to post back questions.

     

    Steven DeVoll, M.S.


    This is a test

  • So, basically what you are saying is that.

    1. The avg. usage and avg. overage figures in the charts of the SelectServer report can't be used for anything.
    2. It is up to the account manager to decide if you use too much or not.

    As Microstation or any vertical products never give any feedback about free licenses (quite contrary to other software), this is a bit hard to understand.

    Regarding our case we do have an additional difficulty, as the upgrade path from Microstation, which we have followed the last couple of years, is broken due to the change to AecoSim. This means that we are using up to 2 licenses per machine (Microstation and Aecosim), as long as we have to run things in parallel. Additionaly we don't have any dataset for Aecosim yet. Thus we are getting overage both by having less Microstation licenses than before (we traded in some for Aecosim), have double count in license use when running both in parallel, and don't have any workspace for Aecosim.

    Not funny.

    P.S.: I'd like to have a second opinion from you about something else, we'll do that offline.

  • Bentley View doesn't work for Staad.

  • Bentley View doesn't work for gINT either, this caused us issues in the past (overuseages) that we were forced to pay for!!

  • I'm glad to see that we are not the only bentley users who feel very uncomfortable with the current way the licensing server works and invoices are calculated.

    Maybe there are companies who welcome this kind of overuse and payment system but in our case the management don't want an overuse because we can't really control the costs. There are no informations or warnings shown to the user that they are going to use the software beyond the payed limit bevor they pull a license (I know, there is no really "pull") . There are also no options for the administration to cap the overuse. They reports show only what has already happend and are useless as a management tool.

    We want to control our costs and therefore we need the right to decide!

    Look at autodesk, their license server concept works very well for us and the most other companies. There is no bad surprise at the end of the quater.

  • So the Q1 overage invoice came in, we went over on InRoads Suite in Q1 only 1 day (maybe 1 hr?!), but we have to pay a penalty of $1,452 + 6% tax for that one 'oops'!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!   Has Bentley taken a basic statistics class?  Should part of the 'Trust' way of life mean that the outliers (a nontypical day where users were slammed with a deadline?) should be ignored, but the average usage should be weighted and used for validating new sales of more licenses or apply a penalty on the difference to encourage/enforce updates to be made (due to repeat over usages possibly)?  Say no to fuzzy math please, keep it simple and give the user the chance to understand, react and avoid or minimize these quarterly "Gotcha!!" surprises.  This will put those managing licenses (or trying to) in some VERY hot seats with management on their case. You will not be making many friends when these invoices hit the desk.  

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  • So the Q1 overage invoice came in, we went over on InRoads Suite in Q1 only 1 day (maybe 1 hr?!), but we have to pay a penalty of $1,452 + 6% tax for that one 'oops'!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!   Has Bentley taken a basic statistics class?  Should part of the 'Trust' way of life mean that the outliers (a nontypical day where users were slammed with a deadline?) should be ignored, but the average usage should be weighted and used for validating new sales of more licenses or apply a penalty on the difference to encourage/enforce updates to be made (due to repeat over usages possibly)?  Say no to fuzzy math please, keep it simple and give the user the chance to understand, react and avoid or minimize these quarterly "Gotcha!!" surprises.  This will put those managing licenses (or trying to) in some VERY hot seats with management on their case. You will not be making many friends when these invoices hit the desk.  

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