Oren Gabay, Founder & CEO of OpenLM, tells us how they empower businesses to achieve improved efficiency and maximize their usage of engineering applications,
First of all, how are you and your family doing?
Oren Gabay: We are a blessed family of 3 members – me, my better half, and my kid.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded OpenLM.
Oren Gabay: During my past experiences, I ran through an infinite number of instances wherein we bought several licensed software and tools but hardly used them. Perhaps, though those tools/software seemed extremely necessary, we later realized we don’t really need them and finally ended up wasting our funds on them. And I must tell you here, and this is an everyday scenario with almost all the companies.
In order to solve this, I teamed up with Rachel Bahar almost 12 years ago and formed OpenLM.
OpenLM has now helped more than 1000 customers globally to purchase or acquire software licenses only when there is a requirement. We are now strengthening our presence all across the globe with a key focus on NA, Europe, and emerging countries (Australia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, LATAM, etc.) Our HQ is in Israel, and we’ve other branches across the US, Japan, Europe (France, Moldova, etc.,) and India.
How does OpenLM market its product/services online?
Oren Gabay: We are a B2B organization that strongly believes in building a strong global partner network. Currently, we have partners almost across all the corners of the world, and most of our partners are the leaders that lead by setting examples or by creating a new trend.
Being associated with such brands, marketing our products has been very effortless since our inception. You can check out our partner list here.
Also, as we offer both on-premise and cloud-based services, the online market has been quite a game for us. We have a strong social media presence. We follow effective email marketing practices to boost our presence.
A large audience base always attends our webinars and online events.
Even the market leaders like Gartner, Capterra, Cuspera, TrustRadius, G2, and others feature us along with customer reviews.
However, we at OpenLM strongly believe in personal interactions. While onboarding our clients, our sales, presales, and support experts always make extra efforts to guide our clients step-by-step to understand our offerings better and utilize them to the depth. You can say we always look at solutions humanly.
How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how did you get through it?
Oren Gabay: OpenLM is among the global leaders that encourage permanent WFH opportunities. We encouraged remote work culture much before the pandemic hit the world.
At present, we have a pool of creative minds working from almost all corners of the world. We have people from Israel, the US, Europe, Japan, India, and several other geographies in any of our team calls. Our team calls usually represent different cultures.
Talking in terms of business gains, we did well during the pandemic hit. Over the years, we have successfully onboarded around 1000+ global customers. And we are proud to say that most of our partners belong to the ‘Fortune 1000’ club and are from small/medium-sized businesses. We customize licensing solutions for around 15+ industries, and 400 of our customers are from the USA.
Our customers are Dupay Synthes (part of Johnson & Johnson), Dynetics, Baker Hughes, L&T, and Urschel Laboratories.
Tell us more about your offering and the technology and architecture you use to help the ITAM/SAM community.
Oren Gabay: Firstly, note that OpenLM is a Software License Management (SLM) tool and not a Software Asset Management (SAM) tool. OpenLM is a leader in engineering & specialty software license management solutions (SaaS, node-locked, token). (Source: Gartner SAM Marketplace Guide, Sep 2021)
OpenLM sheds light on an area inside organizations where SAM managers have no visibility – how the end-users utilize software licenses. We are proud to own a solution that provides value to every organization that seeks to optimize workflows and budgets.
To better understand this, let’s take an example. The organization has access to a SAM tool. However, that’s just a first step towards better budget management. SAM tools perform the following:
➢ Tracks the software inventory, entitlements (Software purchase records), and their deployment across the organization
➢ Provide inventory and discovery services
Whereas SLM tools, such as OpenLM,
➢ focuses on managing software licenses
➢ monitors, manages, controls license usage and statistics
➢ helps in forecasting and procurement planning
➢ cannot discover the software installed on a workstation; however, it can report the usage of the software
Also, OpenLM is integrated with SAM tools (ServiceNow, Xensam, License Consult Experts).
So, SAM managers
➢ don’t have to spend countless hours of their limited time launching every license manager provided to the vendors to obtain license utilization reports.
➢ Instead, they need only access to the EasyAdmin interface to access all the license managers the organization owns and obtain accurate license usage reports in a single common report format.
➢ Gains complete visibility of how the software asset inventory is used and can identify where the organization can cut costs at a minimum of 15-20%.
➢ Whether it’s an expensive license that is underutilized – or worse, not in use at all – or whether it has purchased too many licenses, OpenLM gives the SAM professional access to the right toolset to fill the information gap SAM tools are unable to fill.
➢ There is much more. It’s not enough to monitor the licenses; you also need a tool to govern the organization’s software assets and automate software license management.
OpenLM’s solution was built to serve this need of professionals dealing with the daily challenges of license management.
What changes are you bringing to enable your customers to be more scalable, improve performance, and reduce their IT License cost by 15-30% annually?
Oren Gabay: At OpenLM, we always strive to bring innovative solutions to the table. With our past experiences and software licensing expertise, we have brought in some phenomenal architectural changes for our customers and partners to meet today’s and future customers’ needs and requirements while improving scalability, and performance, providing easier upgrades, better functionality, and less dependency between components. See below:
➢ We have broken the monolith, which is now helping our partners and clients identify their core services.
➢ We have brought in multiple components like Identity Management, Directory Synchronization, Notifications, Users and Groups, Agent Handling, etc., that can run multiple instances of each software component.
➢ We provide cloud-based software license management (pay per use) along with perpetual & on-premise offerings, installing containers (dockers)
➢ At present, OpenLM can run on any device (BYOD) and any platform (BYOS); you name it – Windows, Linux, or UNIx. OpenLM is compatible with any OS. Soon, you will find OpenLM Agent supporting macOS as well.
➢ We also introduced our new architecture recently. With this architecture, our internal webserver capabilities have become more efficient and apt.
➢ We have recently changed the default DB to MariaDB and MongoDB, and our customers are getting highly benefited as we are now helping them migrate.
➢ Along with this, OpenLM has worked extensively to remove all the vulnerabilities. Now, all our clients can configure their systems remotely.
➢ We’re a GSA contract holder and will soon be SOC2 and ISO 27001 certified.
This ensures the clients with higher scalability and enables them to support any amount of load. Add to this, we have built a state-of-the-art cloud portal that would encourage our partners and clients to go SaaS and become more scalable, reduce their IT Licensing cost tremendously and improve their overall performances.
We achieve all of these by offering two flexible pricing packages: Monitoring and Automation, to suit any size of business. Be it for on-premise or cloud-based offerings, our customers can select packages according to their needs and requirements. You can check our price plan here.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?
Oren Gabay: Our website has been our most effective means of showcasing our products, highlighting what we do and how we plan to solve software licensing challenges, and achieving other business goals and objectives.
Furthermore, we have a well-versed and highly experienced marketing team that is super-active on almost all social media platforms, emails, newsletters, webinars, podcasts, and other types of marketing, such as affiliate and third party blogging.
The Marketing Team puts into action various CRM, SEO, Social Media Analytics, Marketing Automation, GA, and Business Intelligence tools to manage and boost our online presence.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Oren Gabay: OpenLM competes globally. The market is fragmented with large and small/medium-sized players. Our unique offerings, support of 60+ license managers, such as IBM, Siemens, Flexera, DSLS, GIS, CAD, CAE, MatLab, ESRI, Reprise, Sentinel, Altair & more, unmatched services, customer relationship, 24/6 support, partnership management, integration with global SAM vendors, staying close to customers, being open and listen to them regularly, and other aspects keep us ahead in the league.
OpenLM is the pioneer when it comes to innovation, new technology, new databases, new architecture, and most importantly, cloud-based SaaS pricing model and professional services, etc.
Your final thoughts?
Oren Gabay: Software licensing is quite a complex process. Every year, almost every organization ends up losing some extra bucks by purchasing licenses they hardly use. OpenLM helps organizations optimize this with OpenLM Free ROI Calculator, identification, reporting of license usage stats, analytics, monitoring, controlling, managing, and governing software assets globally irrespective of location, size, departments, projects, and workgroups. Thus, enabling them to grow agile and scalable at the same time.
With our new cloud portal, we are on a mission to empower organizations to go SaaS and reduce their licensing cost annually by a remarkable margin. You can reduce your license cost by using the OpenLM calculator or Autodesk Calculator.
Your website?
Product video links:
Autodesk named user license: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZPVB_6f6U
Solution for Engineering Licenses Management & Optimization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFs1GzxYJf0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3jKccZ0B9Y&t=404s -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmdV7hEqYtI&t=25s
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