License Management Tool for an IT Consulting Company

Project snapshot

A global software development company working with numerous advanced technologies to undertake sophisticated projects for clients across diverse industries faced the need to bring structure and transparency to their complex system of product licenses. With hundreds of people using licensed software on a daily basis, the company needed better control and visibility over the subscriptions it held and planned to acquire.

Business сhallenge

Our client uses licensed software at all levels of the organization: collaboration tools, development platforms and frameworks, special-purpose products, etc. In addition, the company places a strong emphasis on the skills and knowledge of its employees and dedicates special effort to assisting them in their professional growth. For that purpose, our client maintains a number of subscriptions to educational resources, allowing employees to access the most up-to-date courses, master classes, and other online learning materials.

With more than 2,000 employees, the company has to provide hundreds of licenses for various software products. But as the business grew, it became increasingly difficult to control and monitor license use to ensure procurement of all required subscriptions, ensure timely renewal of existing ones, and prevent any misuse or abuse of license terms. It was time to revise the client’s license management processes and make them more straightforward and transparent by leveraging the capabilities of advanced technology solutions.

Solution delivered

To address our client’s requirements, we built a license monitoring platform with a Grafana-based visual dashboard, allowing the company to have a real-time view of the state of licensing information. The challenging part was to secure integrations with multiple third-party products to collect license data, for which we created a number of separate applications. As a result, the platform supports dynamic monitoring of multiple data sources, such as Prometheus, Datadog, and ServiceNow. In addition, the solution opens opportunities for integrating internal corporate applications by providing custom modules.

The license monitoring platform consumes data from various sources according to a custom schedule, allowing the company to set up an effective update rate taking into consideration the time zones in which it operates. License data is updated automatically, always presenting an up-to-date view of the current state of software subscriptions. The platform supports automatic validation of existing licenses and removal of irrelevant ones.

Platform users can monitor license states on a visual dashboard displaying the current set of subscriptions and providing valuable insights, such as the number of active users of each product, the number of available seats for each license, and the number of completed courses on educational resources. The solution supports integration with the most popular enterprise communication tools, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, to provide stakeholders with timely notifications and alerts related to license management. Such next-level visibility allows the business to more precisely assess the efficiency of its license investments and opens optimization opportunities.

Business outcomes

With automated license management and monitoring, the software development company brought organization and order to its system of product subscriptions. A single control dashboard provides unprecedented transparency and visibility of the license acquisition and allocation processes. Centralized license management gives the company a 360-degree view of its product subscriptions with a number of substantial business benefits:

• A reduction in manual work achieved as a result of automated license data updates
• Subscription cost optimization based on insights about actual license usage and requirements
• Effective license management, accounting for organic business processes such as new project launches, employee rotation, and new employee onboarding
• Compliance with license terms and applicable regulations related to use of proprietary software
• Platform scalability, allowing for integration with custom applications of the company’s choice