Entries by Henrik Goldman

I believe that today is a great day!

Why, you might ask? Because that is what I want it to be!

What we enjoy the most is helping real people with real licensing problems, without making them pay a fortune for our solutions.

We welcome customer feedback, since it enables us to both improve our software and help out our users. We estimate that we've improved our applications, LM-X and License Statistics, to solve specific problems for more than half our users. Sometimes, the changes have been small issues that took 5 minutes to work out. Other times, we've improved our software to accommodate more than 10 feature requests from a single customer. In the majority of cases, software improvements are made without any additional costs for our users.

On average, our bug fixing time is far under 24 hours. Plus, we're continually improving our techniques, so the likelihood of future software problems is steadily decreasing.

Today, our software is being used by more than 70 companies in various industries, such as computer game manufacturing, electronics, EDA, architecture, digital entertainment, manufacturing, mechanical engineering, bioinformatics, mining and many others.

We see each of these companies as individuals with unique problems that we can help to solve. And we don't restrict our attention to only the biggest companies. We are interested in helping our customers regardless whether they're a small startup company or a mega-corporation with annual sales of billions of dollars.

That's just how we are...we help our customers because we enjoy it.

So, when I say that this is a great day, it's because this is another day that I have the opportunity to help out our customers and satisfy their needs.

The large companies who use License Statistics generally have hundreds of licenses. In some cases, we've had the opportunity to work with companies who have a few thousand licenses, which is quite a significant number of licenses to monitor.

However, we've recently been working with a large organization whose license monitoring requirements are a magnitude greater than any we have encountered thus far. This particular organization has up to about 12,000 CITRIX licenses serving many thousands of users daily.

As this customer pointed out, they had a hard time finding vendors capable of meeting their requirements. Most vendors would never be able to support their requirements, because their monitoring techniques would be incapable of handling the large scale of the company's setup, which involves a great number of machines. With so many users and licenses, their enterprise environment jumps to a new level, where speed of software and optimization of algorithms become crucial. License Statistics was able to meet the challenge.

Working with this organization, we optimized License Statistics to be capable of monitoring this type of large-scale enterprise environment. With only a few days of work, we managed to cut down graph generation time by up to a factor of 10. Currently, creating the graphs for this site takes only about 2 minutes.

We've been quite satisfied with the results so far. Due to License Statistics straightforward interface, it didn't take long to make the adjustments needed to accommodate this customer's requirements.





The above figure shows a set of CITRIX licenses we've captured together with this particular customer. It shows more than 8000 licenses being used at once. An interesting observation is that their license utilization is quite good, as about 8000 licenses are used a significant share of the time.

When tracking licenses, you need the flexibility to view exactly the types of reports that you care about. For example, what if management asks you for a report that compares application A with application B? Or how about showing the combined behavior of two departments as one graph?

These may seem like common, simple tasks, but actually delivering on these kinds of requests certainly is not trivial to accomplish. We've witnessed users creating their own customs scripts to solve such reporting challenges with a varying degree of success.

Now we are able to provide you with custom graphs as they should be done. Effortlessly.

Working closely with our customers, we have created an open engine that allows you to make custom graphs beyond the extent of what License Statistics competitors offer. Best of all, custom reporting is available at no extra cost when you purchase License Statistics, starting at only 150 EUR.

Our custom reporting utility lets you generate almost any type of report you could imagine, based on usage, users or groups. All of these reports include graphs representing usage based on your specifications. You can select the start and end time of a report; define whether you want to see daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even yearly statistics; narrow down results using filters that include or exclude applications, users or groups; and control what the results look like.

All in all, our custom graphing engine gives you more than 15 different graph types, letting you provide your organization with the results needed. It is an ideal tool to let you quickly answer questions such as, "What is our usage of XYZ compared with ABC?"

Here are just a few examples of custom reports you can create:

- A user-based graph that shows user performance on a monthly basis for a specific product
- A usage report of products A, B, C and D within a single graph that shows a side-by-side comparison of each product's usage
- Weekly graphs showing group-based usage
- An annual report of servers A and B merged together as one graph -- even though the servers are in different physical locations



The above figure shows an example of a custom report. Here we have 5 applications compared with one another within the same view, represented as a monthly report.

Custom reporting is easy to set up and can be scheduled to give you updates on an automatic basis. Additionally, you can share the HTML pages throughout your organization without installing 3rd party software on all your machines, making it easy to distribute usage tracking information to your group or department.

With the latest version of License Statistics, you can now make flexible group reports. This is a useful feature for tracking groups of users within one or multiple departments.

Being able to look at license usage on a group basis can be an essential element in answering some common usage questions. Let's say you have application ABC, which is used by two teams. A question often raised is, "How do the two teams" usage of the application compare?"

A simple question with a not-so-simple answer, until now. Now, you can get group reports that will quickly and easily answer such questions.

For example, you can generate a graph that shows group usage to let you evaluate how well groups actually perform.



The above figure shows an example of a report that lets you see AutoCAD usage for two user groups. At a glance, you can see which team comes out on top.

With the most recent version of LM-X, we've added a new license model: trial licenses.

Trial licenses are essentially demo licenses that allow an end user to evaluate software without acquiring a license from the vendor. Trial licenses make it easy to enable evaluations for a mass market without worrying about making restrictive licenses for individual evaluators.

This enhancement adds functional value to LM-X, offering a completely streamlined interface to support anonymous evaluations for local licenses, network licenses, borrowed (mobile) licenses, grace (backup) licenses and now trial licenses.

We have engineered this functionality with the input of some of our users, who provided their feedback to aid us in helping them solve their distinct needs.

If you'd like an evaluation of LM-X to see how it can meet your licensing needs, feel free to send us a request.

Who says you need a license file to run LM-X?

Starting with the next LM-X release, you'll be able to supply licenses in a string instead of using external files. Using a string is helpful for libraries because licenses can be stored in custom configuration files or any other appropriate path.

This is yet another feature we've recently added to accommodate and satisfy our users needs.

If you have not yet tried an evaluation copy of LM-X, we invite you to see for yourself why both small and large corporations have chosen LM-X as their license management solution.

We believe it's important to support the next generation of IP addresses, so LM-X will now support IPv6. Although the deployment of IPv6 networks has been slow in coming, it seems that several organizations are planning IPv6 deployments throughout 2008.

For LM-X, we chose to implement dual-stack support for IP addresses, as the majority of websites and official documents recommend. Dual-stack support essentially means that the application and server can communicate with either IPv4 or IPv6 at the same time, without requiring programmers to make any changes. The IPv6 support works automatically if IPv6 is enabled.

It's interesting to see that Windows prefers IPv6 over IPv4 when IPv6 is available. For example, Microsoft writes that with Vista, most networking protocols work directly on IPv6 without notifying the user.

A typical problem with storing sensitive data is facing the risk that someone could copy and spy on the information. This type of theft has been seen countless times for information stored on typical home PC's, such as home banking and credit card information.

Although the optimum answer to such problems would be hardware-based security devices capable of storing such information, this is a costly solution that does not necessarily satisfy the demand for a particular market. Assuming that users are not experts in hardware security and are unlikely to understand why it's useful, employing such methods could produce more support troubles for vendors than it solves.

For license management and copy protection, it is unlikely that hardware would be used as the solution to sensitive data security, if only for the simple reason that no one is interested in paying for such hardware.

To address such security issues, we've taken a different approach and have created a secure storage engine that is entirely software based. Although the solution cannot surpass the security of hardware devices, it certainly improves the security of fixed locations where information is stored. The idea behind this method of security is to scatter information and collect it when needed. This information can be scattered to as many as 500 different locations making it extremely difficult to globally reconstruct the information and all the redundancy information.

This functionality will be introduced in the next version of LM-X License Manager to solve some particular customer requests.

If you'd like more details about our secure storage solution, feel free to contact me on the subject at hg@x-formation.com.

Tracking your licenses is important; that's nothing new. Who wouldn't want to lower their costs and increase the value of software purchases?

Having an automated, easy to use tool that lets you see current and long term usage can help you optimize your license usage in the long run. It's easy to understand that if you have 30 licenses and 10% are virtually unused, that 10% of waste can have a significant impact on your budget. Many of our customers face these issues, some of whom have not just 30 licenses, but several thousand.

In addition to getting the big picture, it's also important to see the specific, detailed information that you and your management need to make budgeting and other decisions. Based on several requests, we have realized that a lot of people would benefit from custom-defined reports that let you present information in various ways and give you the option to view those reports in Microsoft Excel.

In answer to this need, we have developed the ability to let you create custom reports of License Statistics data. Essentially, a custom report is an HTML or CSV file (directly importable by Excel) that shows the data you want to see.

Custom reports let you filter all the usage information as either per-application or per-user; choose the frequency of the reporting periods to get daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly reports; specify which columns you want to see; and designate when the reports should start and end. You can also apply several other filters to be get fine-grained results that give you exactly the usage facts that interest you.



The above example of a custom report shows per-user information for two applications, Architectural Desktop and AutoCAD. The frequency of reporting has been designated as monthly. In this report, you can see the number of hours a specific user has used these applications during a month. While we selected to see the Total Used Hours column in this report, we could choose to see any other column(s) as well.

Further increasing the report's usability, you can sort the columns in the HTML pages, so you can easily see, for example, which users accessed licenses for the greatest and least hours.



In addition to the HTML page, the same custom report data is output to a CVS file, which you can open in Excel, as shown above.

We believe that these kinds of reports are an essential part of understanding your license usage so you can detect license under- or over-utilization and optimize budgets.

This functionality has been made possible with the help of our users, several of whom graciously participated in shaping, critiquing, and testing custom reporting. As always, we welcome and encourage continued feedback from our users so that we can improve License Statistics functionality even further.

Our license management software, LM-X License Manager, now includes support for Java. This language support strengthens our software, making it even more flexible than before.

This additional support will benefit both existing and new customers. This enhancement comes from requests made by our customers, some of whom have kindly provided their references for using LM-X. These companies include:

- Clc bio A/S
- Spielwerke
- Tuscany Design Automation, Inc.

Their references can be read at:
http://www.x-formation.com/about/customers.html

License Statistics now includes support for IBM LUM license servers.

Advanced, expensive applications such as CATIA use IBM LUM, and our competitors would have you believe that supporting software such as CATIA is a major expense. We often hear stories from our customers saying that competing license management software demands prices up to 5-50 times higher than License Statistics. Unlike our competition, we don't feel that it should cost a fortune to monitor software packages like CATIA. We want to give you a better alternative, by making our solutions work, keeping them simple, and keeping them affordable.

Our addition of IBM LUM support is in direct response to a customer request and is available for both new and existing customers with the most recent version of License Statistics. This new support is yet another example of working with our users to help them solve real life problems.

A new feature in License Statistics now lets you use custom parsers.

By creating custom parsers, you can use License Statistics with legacy license servers (such as ELAN LM), proprietary license servers such as those a company may develop internally, or any other license server not currently supported by License Statistics.

Creating a custom parser is simple: you create an application that reads the license use and then outputs it to an XML file of a predefined format. You then configure License Statistics to read this file at specific intervals to gather updated data. License Statistics writes the gathered data to graph, HTML, XML, and all other accessible formats.

The custom parsing functionality lets you reap even greater benefits from License Statistics by letting you monitor applications that run under any license manager.

With the newest version of LM-X, we have introduced a new feature: Automatic Server Discovery (ASD).

ASD automatically finds license servers on the end-user's network. With this feature, users no longer have to specify license server information. This results in more productivity and less troubles for system administrators. System administrators will more easily be able to move license servers around, causing less downtime for users of protected applications.

Our goal is simple. We want LM-X to be a better alternative to existing license managers. With this new feature, LM-X has gone one step further towards becoming a totally transparent license manager. Knowing how many problems users have dealing with the intricacies of competing systems, we understand how important it is to hide the complexities away.

Technically, ASD works by performing UDP broadcasting in order to find available servers. Server information is cached locally on each client and updated only when needed. This results in a zero-penalty when using ASD on a daily basis.

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LM-X is currently used by several large companies, including Enventive Engineering and Perkins Engines, protecting software worth millions of dollars. LM-X protected applications are used on about 15 computer platforms and are deployed to several fortune-500 companies in the USA. Large automotive and appliance manufacturers and companies in the military industry depend on LM-X every day for it's licensing operations.

Recently, a few of our users have asked which applications License Statistics works with.
Currently, our software enables you to monitor almost all software using FLEXlm/FLEXnet, Sentinel LM/RMS, LM-X and IBM LUM. In the future, we'll likely include even more support.

Our users have told us the applications they want to use our software with, and we do our best to accommodate their needs. This list of software given below is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is possible to monitor, but will give you an idea of the software our users are monitoring today:

Cadence, ProE, SolidDesigner, Plankor Systems, IDEAS, Mentor Graphics, OpenWorks, Geoframe, VoxelGeo, Petrosys, Pixar Renderman, Synopsys, Maya, Rational, Actify, 3dsmax, Ansys, Citrix, Telelogic DOORS, ProVision Enterprise Modeling software, Boujou, Shake, Fusion, Tinder, Matlab, Flowmaster, Diadem, Isight, AVL(Excite/PUMA), Origin, GTPower, Rhapsody, Algor, ESRI ArcInfo, Solidworks, Abaqus, Fluent and Autocad.

With IBM LUM support we also support CATIA.

During 2007, a competing product, Samreport, will be discontinued. The vendor of this software has a larger enterprise solution, FLEXnet Manager, that will provide the same functionality as Samreport plus much more. However this comes with a price increase.

We feel license management should be available to anyone. Unlike our competition, we don't think software like this is rocket science, and we keep our prices appropriately reasonable. License Statistics prices start at just 150 EUR.

License Statistics currently accomplishes all that Samreport does today. In some cases, our software can provide even more, because its open framework lets you easily extend its usage by employing simple scripts.

We care about our customers and want to give you a better alternative than paying more than you should for effective license monitoring. From now until the end of 2007, we are offering Samreport users a 10% discount on the purchase of License Statistics.

This is a time-limited offer and is considered on a case-by-case basis to ensure compliance with this terms of the offer.