IT Asset Management
Entitlements versus consumption: licence compliance without a spreadsheet
How many licences do we own, how many do we use, and how sure are we? How OpsCloud365 compares seats with installations and assignments and turns the result into a status per product.
The question usually arrives by email, with a software vendor in the subject line and a friendly tone: they would like to reconcile the current licence position. From that moment on, many organisations start a hunt for invoices, contracts and a spreadsheet somebody maintained two years ago. We built the licence side of OpsCloud365 so that the answer to this email sits in one place and is correct every day, not only on the day of the audit.
A simple calculation
The idea behind licence compliance is deliberately plain. On one side are the entitlements, the seats you bought. On the other side is the consumption, installations plus assignments. The difference gives each product a status.
Five states are enough: compliant, under-licensed, over-licensed, expired and not monitored. The last one matters more than it sounds. Open-source tools or software without licence obligations should not show up as violations just because they are installed. “Not monitored” is a deliberate decision, not a gap.
Where the consumption comes from
A software product in OpsCloud365 has a publisher, a category and a licence model, for example per user, per device or per core. Beneath it hang the licences with seats, cost, expiry date and the contract they come from. Assignments connect a licence with a person or a device. Installations are recorded manually or taken over from an inventory.
That is why the calculation is traceable. If you want to know why Visio counts as under-licensed, you open the product and see seven installations against five seats. No algorithm, no estimate, just a list you can walk through.
Contracts belong to it
Licences expire, and they usually do so at a moment when nobody is thinking about them. So contracts are objects of their own in OpsCloud365: maintenance, support, leasing, subscription or licence agreement, with term, value, payment cycle, notice period and auto-renewal. A contract inside its notice window or about to expire is highlighted, on the contract list and as a figure on the home page.
Licences and assets can be assigned to a contract. This answers a second question from the vendor’s email almost by itself: which contract did the seats in question come from?
The view from above
Management or procurement usually needs one number: how much money is tied up in licences, and where is the risk. The ITAM dashboard shows compliance per product, the distribution of statuses and contracts by expiry date. A report exports the same data as PDF or Excel when the vendor wants a file.
Why not a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet can do all of this too, on the day it is maintained. The difference lies in the events in between: an employee leaves the company, their notebook is returned, the licence stays assigned. In OpsCloud365 the assignment hangs on the user and the device, and the return is an event that stays visible. The licence position is not a snapshot but the current state of a history.
The vendor’s email does not get any nicer. But the answer takes ten minutes instead of two weeks, and it is right.
All images show the real application with fictitious demo data.