Get visibility into license position and usage of your engineering applications to eliminate audit risks, inefficient usage of licenses, inaccurate forecasting, and to prevent denials.

Engineering applications refer to categorizing software products that are used in industries such as aerospace, oil and gas, and construction.

A concurrent license enables multiple users to share access to software applications from any computer on a network or from a virtual machine. License management servers that are installed on the network manage the distribution of a pool of shared licenses.

You can have multiple license management servers; one for each engineering application. The number of concurrent licenses in the shared pool determines the number of users who can use the software application at a given time. When you want to use an application, that application sends a request to the appropriate license management server to determine if a license is available. If a license is available, the application starts and the number of available licenses decreases by one. When the user exits the application, the license returns to the pool.

The following graphic illustrates the way OpenLM works with the ServiceNow instance.

The Software Asset Management application supports three types of licenses: floating, network, and token licenses. For information on these licenses, see Software license metrics.

The ServiceNow instance integrates with OpenLM to collect data from license management servers. OpenLM is a software license monitoring and management tool that integrates with a wide variety of license management servers such as IBM License Use Management (LUM), Sentinel Technologies, and Bentley Systems, Inc. OpenLM connects with each license management server, consolidates the data, and gets the data into your ServiceNow instance via the ServiceNow Store application.

After you download the ServiceNow Store application and configure the application via Guided Setup, OpenLM triggers data collection from all the license management servers that are connected to OpenLM. Data such as license usage, denials, user activity, and alerts are collected from the license management servers by OpenLM and transferred to the ServiceNow instance. The data is normalized and reconciled to produce reports. You can see the total spend on engineering software, the most used or the most denied products, license usage over time, and many other reports on the Engineering License Overview dashboard.