Getting started
This section of the help gives you a quick description of how to determine your initial, simple estimated license position, and then understand what that means. This section supplements the rest of the help, which provides more detail about the more advanced features of License Optimizer.
License Optimizer enables you to develop an estimated license position by comparing usage with entitlement: taking software inventory and comparing it against your license entitlements. When you have developed an estimated license position, your licensing expert can use it to identify where your organization is under-licensed (at risk of a compliance audit) or over-licensed (wasting money on unnecessary software purchases). Note that owing to the complexity of many licensing rules, your true license position can be determined only by an experienced licensing expert. License Optimizer helps your licensing expert to gather the data they require and then identify areas for them to focus their efforts on. This enables them to produce a document known as an Effective License Position (ELP).
A good place to start is to watch this video, which gives a high-level overview of the concepts behind License Optimizer:
License Optimizer can help you to understand the complexities of your software licenses, help you to prepare for a license audit, and help you to optimize your license usage.
After some initial housekeeping, such as creating user accounts, the process you will follow is:
•Import your hardware and software inventory, and your user data (licenses are typically associated either with a piece of hardware that runs the software, or a user that uses the software).
You then use License Optimizer to match your software records to items in Ivanti's Definitive Software Library (DSL) (a large database of known software titles). The system does much of this matching automatically.
•Import your license data (your vendors can provide you with this).
Again, you match the software titles mentioned on your licenses to items in the Ivanti DSL, and again much of this matching is automatic. At this point, by using the known titles in the Ivanti DSL as an intermediary, you have matched your software assets to software items on licenses that you own.
•Reconcile your software assets with your licenses. During reconciliation, License Optimizer’s rules engine intelligently assigns licenses to software to give you the optimal license position.
•Examine your initial estimated license position.
You can now see where you have too many or too few licenses. Often, the answer you get is not what you expect – this is almost always because your data is not in the correct shape, or is incomplete. We will cover some strategies to address these issues. The important thing is to understand your license position and address any issues you discover ahead of an audit.
We recommend that you don't try to do everything at once. Pick a vendor, and possibly just a single area of your business, and work on this first. After you have determined and understood your estimated license position for a part of your IT estate, you will find it much easier to extend this to the rest of your estate.
What's Next?
Now that we have discussed what we hope to achieve, let's get started: Start here