NO MORE SPIRALLING SOFTWARE COSTS - JUST DATA-DRIVEN PRECISION WITH CQFLEXMON

MEET "THE" ARCHITECTS

This acclaimed design practice is known for delivering high-quality work across architecture, master planning, and interior design. With particular strengths in the workplace, lifestyle and leisure, and residential sectors, the 200-person team operates from multiple studios across Europe. Dedicated to crafting sustainable and inspiring spaces, the firm often works in collaboration with prominent artists and interior designers, pushing client briefs with bold and tailored design responses—while also promoting the integration of art into the built environment.           

THE CHALLENGES

Hidden costs and how to find them

There's a hidden problem that comes along with software licensing. It's one that companies often don't even know they have. 

Your software usage is likely to revolve around a core portfolio of the most commonly-used applications—Autodesk, Adobe, and SketchUp being prime examples—for which you pay for licences annually. That's the problem; companies so often have no precise notion of the frequency of use among their users, whether some are heavy and some are light, or even if they're breaking their licence agreements by allowing unlicensed users to work with applications they're not paying for.

Precision—making sure the licences you pay for correlate exactly to the usage requirement you have for them—is difficult to achieve if your licensing decisions are based on conversations with departments or team heads.

This Studio decided that something had to be done to avoid both the hidden costs resulting from under-usage of licensed applications and the possibility of vendor fines that could result from over-usage:

"We were looking for a reliable method of tracking software usage amongst our staff and hardware. Traditionally, when it came to renewal time, we would examine how many requests for different applications had been made into our support desk or gain information through separate vendor licensing portals, which was a complex process. We were also finding that tracking which users had particular applications and versions was a time-intensive task". IT Manager

THE SOLUTIONS

Getting the house in order

The IT manager was spending a significant amount of time keeping track of licence usage, and trying to eradicate over- or under-utilisation. Any occurrence of both instances could have run the risk of non-compliance with software vendor terms of usage and/or wasted investment. This was time that they would far rather have been allocating to productive and proactive IT issues than to admin matters. 

With a large number of staff demanding attention, justifiably expecting easy access to the tools necessary to do their jobs, there was also the matter of new staff onboarding and other staff leaving. Although this is the normal dynamic of any sizeable company, it still has an impact on licence reassignment, a further complication in ensuring the efficient, cost-effective, and compliant management of software licensing.

"We knew we had to have a better way of managing accurate licence renewals to keep on top of spiralling software renewal costs, cut down on the admin time, and ensure we were meeting vendors' usage requirements", " We just wanted to do it right, while making sure we were optimising our software investment". 

EFFORTLESS CONTROL AND VISIBILITY

Symetri's proprietary software licence monitoring tool, CQFlexMon, was developed to address the many issues and complexities that companies face when trying to manage their own licensing arrangements. Listening to our customer’s concerns, the Symetri team proposed a demo of the tool. And there was no hesitation in adopting it:

"CQFlexMon had it all covered. Of major appeal to us was the real-time visibility it could give us; every licence, everywhere, who was using it, how often. We realised it was also offering more than visibility; it was giving us control and it was effort-free. The data we need, whenever we need it".

THE RESULTS

Constant vigilance, confidence, and insight

In the initial deployment period, the team wanted to familiarise themselves with the changes and benefits that CQFlexMon would bring in terms of efficient licensing management.  With the company's most recent major Autodesk renewal, they used the reports produced by CQFlexMon live in a meeting to inform their decisions.

The finance and IT teams together went through the recent logs, reviewing infrequent software usage users and evaluating licensing options best suited to observed usage patterns, and ongoing efficiencies, whilst minimising licence costs. They also identified one or two reporting options they wished to be included to customise CQFlexMon to their own internal requirements. This process led to a strategy to use Flex Tokens to their maximum threshold. The team also uses CQFlexMon Manage Autodesk module to monitor and audit token usage.

Symetri made the changes that the Studio had asked for; a feature of CQFlexMon being the flexibility to customise the content and presentation of reports to exactly how a company wants to see them. Real-time monitoring and reporting is now an integral element of efficiency at this Architects; providing instant insight, whenever required.

They now use CQFlexMon not just for their Autodesk licences but also for other products such as Adobe, SketchUp and some other smaller applications. They use CQFlexmon primarily before licence renewals are due in. The visibility they have gained has enabled them to use Autodesk Flex Tokens more accurately to address the needs of occasional users.

"Since deploying CQFlexMon we have a clear portal into software versioning, usage and deployment locations across the entire company. Every software renewal is now easier to manage, and licensing numbers can be more accurately predicted. CQFlexMon has been well worth the investment, we have great support from Symetri and now a much clearer view of our software assets." IT Manager.