We are a customer of Flexera One.
For Flexera One, we work mostly with licenses. Whatever products we are purchasing, we upload POs into Flexera One and map them to the licenses correctly to check whether all data is compliant. If not, we perform effective license positioning on that data. Flexera One helps us maintain a clear picture of our finances, showing what software we have purchased this year and what we should purchase next year. The solution provides this information in the form of dashboards where we can see where we have actually spent more, which publisher we are spending more with, and which publisher we are spending less with.
The features of Flexera One I appreciate most involve uploading a PO, which gets processed and directly mapped to the license I need. Flexera One allows me to check the existing information by SKUs. There is a specific SKU for each of the licenses. I find the SKU library valuable because when I am changing companies, in the next company I am unaware about their SKUs and products initially. I can check Flexera One's SKU library and verify whether a product has existed there and was mapped to that license earlier. I can then map the current licenses in that way.
I use Flexera One's analytics feature. We can see the dashboards of Flexera One. The best key analytics I can see are which publishers are at risk and what unprocessed purchases already exist. We can also see the unprocessed purchases in Flexera One. We can check that we have 100 unprocessed purchases for this month, then we have to process it and make it processed. After making it processed, since it is processed, we have already mapped the license there. That is the basic license compliance health we can check through Flexera One analytics.
After reconciliation, whatever applications and entitlements we have are calculated against the consumed versus the purchased versus the compliance position. By repeating this reconciliation regularly, the compliance can be trended over time. Suppose there are matched installations mapped to the applications, and applications are mapped to the licenses. We can recalculate dynamically at each reconciliation.
Since Flexera One is basically used for IT asset management (ITAM) and SAM, and since it is designed to support complex hybrid licensing models and is vendor verified for major publishers, compliance tracking is recalculated dynamically and can be trended over time using the built-in reports and analytics. It offers SaaS management, showing user activity, active and inactive users, license utilization, and different licensing models such as subscription, custom metric, and perpetual. For example, this year we are spending a certain amount over subscription, and next year we will either go ahead more or less with that subscription licensing based on our needs.
Suppose last year we purchased 200 licenses, and after uploading all the POs and checking all the installations for those licenses, we discovered that out of 200, we are just using 10. So 190 licenses were not being utilized. This year, we are coming up with a plan to go ahead with 20 after demand categorization. We are saving the 190 license cost this year. Even though we had purchased last year, this year we are aware that we should not spend this much because we are not using that application more than 10.
We are using multiple metrics for Flexera One, including inventory, license reconciliation, SaaS activity, procurement, and lifecycle data. For compliance, we check the compliance position at the start of the period and the compliance position at the end of the period. There is the change between the purchased and the consumed counts over time. These metrics are available and visible in the dashboard of Flexera One.