Five things you may not know about software license management

May 29, 2026
License Statistics

With today’s economic challenges, many organizations are taking a serious look at their budgets to find ways to tighten their belts. When searching for strategies to eliminate excessive costs, one area could hold more promise than you think: effective software license management. Surprised? Read on to discover five things you may not know about managing your software licenses, but should.

1. Software costs are one of the leading causes of wasted spend.

Unused, underused, redundant, and top-tier licenses that are chock-full of unneeded features may be siphoning your money away. Without accurate information about license usage across your organization, you can easily overrun your IT budget and negatively impact your bottom line. Software license management is essential for cost control and enhancing productivity.

Start making better-informed budgeting and purchasing decisions that boost efficiency throughout your organization with License Statistics. License Statistics’ clear, accurate reports on your current and historical software usage give you the crucial information you need to:

Make informed decisions based on a clear understanding of your license usage
Forecast future licensing needs and negotiate better agreements with vendors
Avoid over-purchasing of software to slash license waste and reduce your software costs by up to 30%
Minimize business risks and maximize ROI

Armed with knowledge about which licenses are underused, License Statistics empowers you to plan your ongoing management and purchases accordingly.

2. The hidden costs of overused licenses can have a significant impact on productivity.

Vendors of high-cost engineering, 3D design, data analysis, and other enterprise-level software commonly use license models (floating, token, or user seat assignments) that allow for sharing a limited pool of licenses across your organization or departmental teams. These types of software applications are expensive, so it’s prudent to buy only as many licenses as you think your teams will use.

However, when critical software is unavailable to a user due to all the licenses being consumed by other users, it can decrease productivity and increase time to market. If your teams are commonly experiencing license checkout denials, it may seem that the easy answer is to purchase more licenses. However, without knowing what exactly is contributing to the shortage, it’s easy to make the wrong purchasing decision and needlessly spend thousands of dollars on additional licenses, with no guarantee that it will actually fix the problem.

License Statistics takes the guesswork out of the equation, giving you clear answers to important questions, like:

How many licenses are available?
Which applications are being used most?
Who has been using licenses and for how long?
Who has license reservations or assignments?
Who has been denied access to a license?
When and how often have denials occurred?
How are end users using applications?

In many cases, the answers to these questions reveal that the real issue is not a shortage of licenses, but a surplus of underutilized licenses. When users neglect to log out of applications they’re not actively using, other users cannot access the blocked licenses, leading to another form of license waste.

License Statistics brings you the perfect solution to this common problem: License Harvesting. License Harvesting uses an Agent to monitor users and applications for idle licenses and automatically release those licenses back to the pool, making them available for other users to check out. You may find that License Harvesting is all you need to guarantee your teams have uninterrupted access to essential software, and thereby avoid purchasing those costly additional seats.

3. License usage tracking doesn’t have to be difficult or require a specialist.

With the seeming complexity of license management, you might find this point to be unexpected. Unlike many other license tracking tools, License Statistics can be used by just about anyone.

License Statistics is a breeze to install and configure, and is accessible using a web browser from any location in the world. There’s no need to install different modules, components, or clients, saving you significant time and effort getting up and running.

With out-of-the-box support for nearly 40 license managers, as well as the ability to configure custom license managers, License Statistics provides more software tracking flexibility than any other license usage tracking tool on the market.

License Statistics reports and graphs are intuitive and straightforward, making it easy to find exactly the information you’re interested in. But what is all of this valuable information worth without the ability to share it? License Statistics facilitates collaboration and information distribution with downloadable reports and customizable, shareable dashboards that you can create simply by dragging and dropping report widgets to achieve the layout you like.

4. You don’t have to rely only on current license usage data for decision making.

Although understanding current license usage is paramount, it doesn’t supply the whole picture. Many teams have ebbs and flows with their usage of particular software applications. If you can only see what’s happening today, you are bound to repeat history and either have too few licenses during peak usage times or too many during lower usage times.

With its unparalleled flexibility, License Statistics is able to gather data from diverse sources, including remote usage, imported usage, and end-user monitoring.

Remote usage reporting provides real-time insights by collecting data directly from your license server at regular, configurable intervals. This ensures you have a reliable picture of software consumption from the moment you begin monitoring usage.

Imported usage reporting analyzes license server log files. Since imported usage reporting doesn’t require a connection to the license server, it’s particularly beneficial for vendors managing back-billing or pay-per-use models and for analyzing data from remote license servers in departments that run on separate networks.

End-user monitoring lets you see usage information received directly from a License Statistics Agent, which is installed on end-user hosts. The Agent gathers data to send back to the License Statistics server for further processing and inclusion in License Statistics’ usual reports.

In addition, some license manager types allow for uploading a metadata file to improve the quality of information gathered from the server, including details about current reservations and features and the total number of licenses in the pool.

5. You don’t have to spend time analyzing gathered data to see the details that matter to you.

Are you most interested in why some users cannot access floating licenses, how license reservations are being used, or contrasting historical data with current activity? Without answers to your specific questions, the granular data describing your license activity loses its value, and you may find yourself wasting significant time digging through mountains of irrelevant data or struggling to interpret complex metrics.

Concise, targeted reporting is essential to quickly obtaining information that’s actually useful to you. License Statistics’ numerous features and user reports pinpoint the details you need to understand both your current and historical license usage.

For users, you can see reports for:

For features, reports include:

Each License Statistics report tells a particular license usage story that readily reveals past usage trends and how licenses are currently being used, helping you to plan future software purchases accordingly.

Ready to gain control over your software license spend?

With License Statistics, you quickly and easily gain a clear, accurate understanding of overused and underused licenses, which users and departments have the highest usage trends, which users have the most frequent or lengthy checkouts—and so much more. All of this valuable information leads to optimized software license usage, increased efficiency and productivity, and cost savings.

Ready to give License Statistics a try? Contact us today to get started on your path to gaining total control over your software license spend.

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