Study And Implementation Of A License Usage Report System Based On Floating Licensing Management

Floating licensing is a widely-used approach for pricing and managing software licenses, especially applicable to high-value software applications that are used intermittently by many users in the enterprise, such as some powerful engineering software packages. Most software vendors use established commercial floating-licensing solutions in order to avoid losses due to piracy. On the other side, the enterprise that needs to use the software does not need to buy a license for each user by the dynamical license allocation schema, which will help greatly reduce the cost on software license purchase.To achieve floating licensing, a software tool called license manager is applied. The main function of license manager is to control where and how the software products are able to run. However, most of license managers just manage the license usage, but not provide license usage statistics functions. The purchasing department of an enterprise could not have the knowledge that how many licenses they would need with the license manager. To meet the license budgeting requirement, some license usage statistics tools that can generate license usage reports occur. But usually the reports generated by the license usage statistics tool are not customized. Customers can not get the right usage reports they want exactly.We firstly study the current status and basic principle of the floating licensing management and the existing license manager and license usage statistics tools in this paper. Meanwhile, we analyze the practical architecture and operational principles of the license servers, license manager and license usage statistics tool of AREVA Company, and identify its functional requirements. According to these, we propose several solutions, make an demonstration and comparison among them and choose the optimal one for the project. Then we develop a license usage report system to implement this solution.The license usage report system designed in this paper can conveniently and efficiently extract the license usage data from the whole license management environment existed, execute some statistics and generate the license usage reports needed, which will offer a very useful license budgeting reference to the customer.