Recoup the one-third of data center software spending that is wasted or underutilized.
Altair has sponsored this post.

Enterprise software management is a growing concern for organizations of all sizes. According to an October 2023 Gartner report, enterprise spending on software is forecast to reach $1 trillion by 2024, a 13.8 percent increase over 2023 estimates. Moreover, software expenditures are the fastest-growing segment of IT spending, outpacing data center systems and IT services. Large organizations often have hundreds of software products in their portfolios, making managing costs and vendors a significant challenge.
Licensing challenges are especially acute for manufacturers and engineering organizations, where software tools are both expensive and critical to competitiveness and productivity.
Based on the Flexera 2023 State of ITAM Report, 33 percent of data center software spend is underutilized or wasted. Organizations frequently purchase software with too many unused features, so tracking usage, right-sizing software portfolios and ensuring that licenses are optimally used can pay large dividends.
Another area of concern is compliance. License compliance is the most common reason companies face fines or legal action from software vendors. In a GovLoop media survey, 74 percent of customers reported one or two vendor audits per year, and 60 percent had not recently conducted a license compliance initiative.
As software consumes an increasingly significant percentage of total IT spending, many large organizations are introducing software asset management (SAM) programs and implementing software asset optimization (SAO) tools to manage software investments more effectively.
Business Benefits of SAM and SAO
Organizations that manage enterprise software assets effectively enjoy several advantages. They can:
- Reduce enterprise software spending as a percentage of revenue.
- Identify and correct software-related issues that may be impacting overall cost and productivity such as excessive denials, license hogging or unusually long user sessions.
- Plan capacity more effectively, ensuring adequate software resources are allocated appropriately and available for critical projects.
Companies can also reduce business risk by ensuring compliance and minimizing the time and effort associated with software license audits.
Managing Software Assets is Easier Said Than Done
Despite the incentives, managing enterprise software assets can be difficult. Organizations frequently find themselves overspending on software and misallocating resources. Despite high spending levels on software licenses, organizations often experience shortages that impact productivity.
In large organizations, departments frequently make independent spending decisions, complicating central management. Mergers and acquisitions result in new vendor relationships and added complexity when taking inventory of assets and tracking usage.
Perhaps the most significant challenge in a multi-vendor software environment is the sheer diversity of license management frameworks. Software vendors use a variety of license managers to meter access to their software. Organizations can find themselves managing dozens of different licensing tools, each with its own interfaces, command-line tools, file formats and license metrics. With multiple siloed tools, getting a consolidated view of license usage, enterprise-wide, can be exceptionally challenging.
Software vendors have also become creative in terms of how software is licensed. Therefore, reporting that reflects the specific licensing models used is critical to ensure compliance. These varying licensing models include (but are not limited to): user-based licensing, subscriptions based on usage, concurrent or floating licensing, as well as enterprise, node-locked and geo-bounded licenses.
Unfortunately, with so many enterprise software applications and licensing models, there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution. Licensing models are fraught with complexity and constantly changing, so SAM tools are hard-pressed to address all these requirements.
Tools used to manage specialized engineering software in areas such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE) and electronic design automation (EDA) have unique requirements. These tools typically need to measure usage patterns, denials, waste and establish policies to optimize engineering and specialty software spending. For this reason, engineering enterprises must look for SAM tools designed to meet their particular needs.
Optimizing Software Assets in CAE Environments
Software tools are critical in engineering design and simulation environments to ensure product quality, manufacturability, durability and time-to-market goals. These organizations must continually develop better, more innovative designs with ever-shorter product cycles.
Engineers frequently run design and simulation tools around the clock in large-scale compute environments to achieve this. They must wring every ounce of productivity from their software tools and compute infrastructure. Manufacturers compete based on the efficiency of their high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure and their ability to maximize return on assets.
Software management can be more challenging in engineering design and simulation environments because the specialized tools required for the job are often expensive, with a high cost per feature and seat. This makes it essential that licenses are used efficiently, shared appropriately and not wasted.
Engineering problems are inherently multidisciplinary, involving many software tools (i.e., structural mechanics, dynamic analysis, computational fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, digital and analog circuit simulation and more). In addition, engineering environments need to support both batch and interactive workloads. Given the high cost of design talent, it is essential to minimize job turnaround times and wait times for licenses.
Critical metrics such as denials in HPC batch environments require special consideration from analysis tools. While denials are obvious for interactive tools, with batch workloads, denials also manifest with longer user wait times—as jobs pending in queues await license availability. This makes finding the root cause of productivity loss to be more complex in engineering and HPC settings.
Getting SAM and SAO Right
An organization’s requirements can range from simple software usage tracking to advanced analytics, denials management and predictive analytics. Features to look for in an effective software asset optimization solution include:
- Open, multi-vendor architecture.
- Real-time license monitoring.
- Built-in reporting.
- Advanced usage analytics.
- Support for organizational hierarchies.
- Cost analytics and soft limits.
- Denials management.
- Real-time alerting.
- Predictive analytics.
- Vendor and GDPR compliance.
Organizations that have an accurate handle on their spending and utilization of software licenses can project future needs and are in a better position when it comes time to negotiate enterprise license renewals with vendors.
Optimizing software assets is critical in large organizations, particularly in engineering and scientific domains. By implementing an effective SAM program and using the right SAO tools, organizations can tune configurations, guide capacity planning, ensure license assets are optimally utilized and right-size their software portfolios based on accurate data. Businesses can then reduce costs, boost engineering productivity, improve security and reduce liability by running the latest software and avoiding compliance-related risks—ultimately improving profitability and competitiveness.
Altair offers multiple solutions for software asset optimization that are open and support dozens of third-party license managers across all engineering disciplines, from structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics to bioinformatics and electronic design automation. Two popular solutions are Altair SAO and the EDA-optimized Altair Monitor.