Hi all

Calculating efficience licence usage

Our customers want to ensure their licence usage is efficient and we want to help them do this, and get a good return from their investment. Below we explain how you can calculate your current licence usage and ensure you are maximising your ROI. As you may be aware we have recently rolled out a feature called Licence Management which will present the information to you, for easy calculation (see further below).  

a. Verify your devices which consume licences

Your device inventory, found in the Devices > Inventory menu in the MaaS360 admin console, is a list of currently or previously enrolled devices. To calculate the number of licences consumed you need to filter using the Managed Status column. The only values which count for licence consumption here are Enrolled and Activated. Any other values don't count. Once you filter on these values you have your value X (current licence consumption). 

X is the number of Enrolled and Activated devices. Let's say we have 1200 devices enrolled: X = 1200

b. See how many licences you have provisioned in your account right now

This can be found on the Setup > Services page. At the top of the page you have the number of licences currently provisioned (activated) on your account. If you have recently purchased licences and they are not showing up, or if the number is different to what you expect, please discuss with your Sales or Business Partner contact or the Client Success team. 

Value Y is the number of licences provisioned on your account. Here we have 1500 licences provisioned: Y = 1500

c. Calculate % licence usage

Now we divide the number of active devices, by the number of active licences: 

So now we know we are using 80% of our licences. Is this an efficient usage? Below is an indicator of what might be an efficient usage of licences. 

Generally speaking your licence is most efficient between 90-100% usage:

• You have not exceeded your licence count (so no "overage" invoice expected for excess enrollments)
• Without purchasing additional licences, you still have a small margin available for new enrollments

What's overage?

Where a customer exceeds the allocated number of licences, by enrolling more devices than they have licences available, the contractual commitment between IBM and that customer is that an overage invoice will be created for additional devices beyond the number agreed. The unit price per device may be the same as the standard price or may be higher depending on the agreement at time of contract. 

How can I avoid overage? 

By keeping your licence % usage at or below 100% you can avoid overage invoices. In certain circumstances customers may prefer to allow this to happen which gives them flexibility in terms of the number of licences they require. However most of our customers want to keep at or below 100% and avoid overage. 

Calculating efficience licence usage with Licence Management enabled

Many of our customers have a new feature called Licence Management - availability of this feature has a dependency on the way in which you purchase. To verify your entitlement to this feature please contact IBM Sales, your Business Partner or your Client Success point of contact. If you do have this feature already enabled and you have run through the activation process (see below), and can see both licences and consumption in the Licence Overview page, you can perform the calculation: 

Setup > Licence Management > Licence Overview

In this scenario we are showing a multi-bundle customer who has a number of different licence types. What counts here is the Base (device enrollment) licences which you can see in the 2nd column above. For each base licence:

Value X = Units purchased, Value Y = Units Consumed, X/Y = % licence usage

Once you have calculated the % of licences used please use the coloured table above to verify whether your licence usage is efficient

Additional information

1. Licence Management feature explained: see recent webcast, delivered in August 2023.

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/security/blogs/eamonn-omahony/2023/08/11/updated-licence-management-webcast-q3-2023

Please note that this link is protected for IBM customers only and requires login with IBMid. 

2. Review your licence usage and "clean up" the older licence consumption: my colleague Margaret Radford has written a very good blog on this.  

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/security/blogs/margaret-radford/2019/03/22/spring-cleaning-your-devices-in-maas360

Questions/comments/responses

If you have any individual customer billing/account queries or information here, you can contact Client Success: csmaas@us.ibm.com