Executive Overview

A study by Gartner in 2008 (“Cost Cutting by Effectively Using Existing Software” by Patricia Adams Feb 7^th 2008) suggested that enterprises that meter application usage can achieve license savings of up to 25% in the first year.  This benefit is qualified by the requirement to use software metering technology that is quick to implement and holistic.

You may well be contemplating a project to start metering the use of applications, indeed it’s quite possible you already have some technology or features inside an existing software product that purport to meter software usage.

The reasons for metering application use are many and varied and include driving down software license fees; ensuring software development and QA outsourcing arrangements are working; planning for application or file migrations and ensuring policies on asset usage are complied with. To ensure these and other business objectives are satisfied application usage metering must be more than just a check-box item.

Real Application Usage Metering

The following represents some of the usage metering use cases that are uniquely covered by Scalable’s tool.

Meter Without Configuration

Most tools that claim to meter software usage with any degree of granularity, require the applications to be metered to be identified up front. Of course this will result in a range of applications being used that do not appear on any usage metering reports; the old saying “you don’t know, what you don’t know” applies. For metering to be effective it should require no configuration and meter all of the applications all of the time with negligible system overhead.

Read/Write Detection

Are your users creating or editing documents within the application or are they just viewing. If you cannot tell, you will certainly be identifying more license requirements than you really need. Also, users often get better service from a reporting or viewer solution if their requirements are genuinely read-only

License Camping

Are your users launching applications to simply trick license control systems into believing they are being used, while the applications themselves sit open and idle on the desktop. This practice is commonplace, particularly for high-end engineering applications that are painful to justify; “use it or lose” is a powerful incentive.

Web Application Usage

Are you able to track usage of SaaS applications? These products represent an increasingly large slice of a software budget and usage needs to be scrutinized like traditional apps. Without the ability to track use of web applications, you will be unable to correctly size a large part of your software portfolio in the near future.

Plug-In Usage

Do you have expensive plug-ins for products like Excel? Are these being used? By ignoring the use of plug-ins a compliance and cost exposure can be created, and migration plans can be derailed since plug-ins often lag releases of the applications they plug-in to.

Virtual Desktops & Applications

Can you determine whether your network license model is sized correctly for your base of virtual desktop users? These application and desktop models are technically very different to traditional applications, yet represent an increasing percentage of  an organizations deployed estate. And since network licenses are more expensive that traditional licenses, failure to meter usage in these scenarios is an oversight.

File Usage

Which files are being loaded and edited the most. If you are looking to migrate to new versions of Office applications you’ll need to know this to help compatibility testing. Without this information you’ll be testing compatibility and migrating files that are simply not needed.

Sub-Function

Many high-end applications have licensing models based on the sub-component of an installed application. In order to correctly size these licenses for such applications, it is essential to be able to meter the use of the sub-functions.

Summary

If you are serious about application usage metering, an holistic approach that covers all the application usage scenarios is essential. For more information on how Survey can help click the button to the left.

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