Stop Playing Games with Your RightAngle Licenses

Software licensing can be quite confusing. There are tens of models used with variances in subscription versus perpetual, CPU-based usage, seat models, and many more. Today we’ll dive into two of the more common license models to help you understand how they operate and understand how to determine which is best for your organization. We will be discussing the differences between a per seat license and a concurrent user license. 

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Per Seat License Models

Per seat license models are based on offering a certain number of individuals access to a software product. The users are typically named and cannot be changed rapidly. Often there are restrictions on what qualifies as a user in the system in these scenarios. For some software it is by device others are actual human users of the application. 

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This model is generally undesired for licensing software as an organization. The restrictive nature makes getting full use of those licenses challenging and leads to future costs if your organization needs to grow or scale. 

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Let me introduce this concept with a real physical world example which should help you understand how it works. Picture a classroom with 50 desks. Every single desk in the room has an assigned name tag on it. Once each desk has someone assigned, no one else’s name can be assigned to that desk, and only those with assigned name tags can get in the room. Even if only 20 of the assigned desks are occupied, no one is allowed to come sit at the empty desks because they are assigned seats to someone else. 

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In many cases, this is the situation when companies are entered into per seat license models. They have a room full of empty seats they’re paying for with individuals (who don’t have an assigned seat but need one) waiting outside the door to get in. This scenario is not ideal. 

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Concurrent User License Models

Concurrent user license models are based on real-time usage at any given snapshot of time. That is, your total license count only matters based on who is in the software product at a given moment in time. You can have up to the total count at any point regardless of who the users accessing the application might be. As you might have figured out, this is a more beneficial model for any organization. It provides flexibility to change who has access. It has the potential to serve more of your user base, particularly with applications which don’t require full-time work inside the application. 

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In our previous classroom example, we can now examine the difference if our room was concurrent user based. There are still 50 desks—those are our 50 licenses. But now, with no assigned seats, anyone can come in and sit at any open seat they see. This allows us to keep the classroom full, meet our user demand, and maximize the investment we made to purchase those seats. 

RightAngle License Model

RightAngle utilizes a per seat license model. They require you to specifically assign a license to an individual within their product. However, they do allow you to change the users assigned at any time. This means with effective management of those licenses you can turn the per seat model into concurrent by having someone manage the assignees of these licenses. If you want to take it a step farther, you can automate this activity via their API, which is exactly what Triangle Software’s License Coordinator can do for you. 

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Triangle Can Help

Reassigning licenses manually can feel like a game of musical chairs. However, at Triangle Software, we offer innovative products for the RightAngle industry. Our License Coordinator product stands alone as the only solution to capture RightAngle usage data, determine license utilization percentages, and automatically reassign licenses based on real-time demand. Connect today to see a demo and understand how it can save you money.