I've decided to put some focus on IBM LUM, which we support through our
License Statistics license usage monitoring software.
There are a handful license managers in today’s market, including
LM-X License Manager, IBM LUM and others. While all of these license managers work similarly and serve the same purpose, they certainly have not been created with the same goal. I won’t make this a history lesson, but it's worth noting that IBM LUM has been around for a long time and is used mainly by CATIA today.
We’ve supported several license managers over the past few years, and I personally think that IBM LUM is a strong candidate for “Most Complex License Manager.” It's designed to accomplish the same task as others, but far more users complain they have problems getting License Statistics to work with it. In some cases, we’ve resolved these problems, and in others our only choice was to leave the support for the application vendor.
Here is a small, unordered list of some of the problems we've seen with IBM LUM:
1. Although its reporting capabilities are written in English, some parts of the reports, such as date information, are output in the local language. So, if you're running a Chinese version of Windows, you’ll get an English report with unicode date characters. Very illogical, and for no obvious purpose.
2. Setting up i4blt (the query utility) comes with about 100 “garbage” files and it's difficult to set up correctly. If you make a single mistake in this process, you’ll get wrong error messages like "server not found." The setup for i4blt is misleading and tricky at best, and a complete failure at worst. Whatever happened to simplistic deployment?
3. The config files that IBM LUM offers are obscure and overly bloated with seemingly useless details. From time to time, customers even ask us to write their config files for them. Obviously, we don't do application-specific support, and wouldn't want to read the 300+ page manual on the topic. I'm sure it's a good night read, though.
4. Speaking of the manual for supporting IBM LUM being 300+ pages, that should be a sign that there are far too many options that can trip you up.
5. Sometimes i4blt takes 1 second to complete, yet for some high availability license clusters it takes up to 15 minutes. Why? No one knows. I guess it's a good reason for spending more on application support, since it seems to work at random in the first place. Furthermore, the speed depends greatly on whether you run the tools on AIX or Windows. Go figure!
6. The reporting is inconsistent. Sometimes it works for high availability licensing, and other times it doesn't.
7. Old, old, old! IBM LUM still runs on Java 1.3, which is now considered ancient, has no support for 64 bit, and lacks modern functionality.
When people come to us with their IBM LUM woes, we assure them that they’re not the only ones. We have over 30 successful installations of License Statistics with IBM LUM, but virtually everyone has problems up-front with the system. How can this be? Obviously, it's alarming, but we learn from such experiences and turn the negative feedback into understanding how things should
not be done. For us, this understanding gives us insight into improved functionality for
LM-X License Manager.
I don't think any of the modern license managers are going to top the complexity of IBM LUM anytime soon. As they say at the Oscars...”We have a winner!”
