Why Engineering Firms Struggle With Software License Compliance (and How to Fix It)

Ask an office IT team about license compliance and they'll talk about Microsoft 365 seats and Adobe subscriptions. Tidy. Countable. Mostly one license per person.

Ask an engineering firm's IT team the same question and watch their face.

Engineering software lives in a different world. Expensive tools, complex license types, half a dozen license managers, and engineers who need things to work right now because a client deadline is on Friday. That mix makes compliance genuinely hard. Not because people are careless, but because the setup is complicated.

Let's look at why, and what actually helps.

Problem 1: Too many license managers

A typical engineering firm might run Autodesk for drafting, Bentley for infrastructure, Dassault or Siemens for product design, Ansys for simulation, Esri for GIS, and a couple of niche tools on FlexLM or Sentinel.

Each vendor uses its own licensing system. Each keeps its own logs, in its own format, with its own definition of "in use." Some count concurrent users. Some count named users. Some log usage after the fact.

So when someone asks, "Are we compliant across our engineering software?" there's no single place to check. There are six.

Problem 2: License types that bend

Engineering licenses come in many shapes. Floating, named-user, node-locked, borrowed, token-based, module-based, dongle-based. Sometimes several types for the same product.

Floating licenses are where compliance gets interesting. The whole point is that software can be installed widely and shared. That's legitimate. But it means "installed on 80 machines" tells you almost nothing. What matters is how many people used it at once, and whether that ever went above what you own.

Some vendors also have systems that don't block you when you go over. Bentley's legacy SELECTserver, for example, logged usage rather than strictly enforcing limits. Great for engineers on deadline. Less great when the bill arrives.

Problem 3: Old servers that never die

Engineering firms are full of long projects. A bridge designed today might need changes in ten years, in the original software version. So old installs stick around. Old license servers stick around. Old license files stick around.

It's surprisingly common for a firm to discover a license server running in a regional office that nobody in head office knew existed. Still serving licenses. Possibly ones that should have been retired years ago.

Problem 4: Engineers are resourceful

This is meant as a compliment. Engineers solve problems. If a license is unavailable and the deadline is tomorrow, someone will find a way around it.

They might copy a license file to a second server. Borrow a license and keep it for weeks. Ask a friend in another office to share theirs. Install a trial and forget about it.

None of this is malicious. All of it can create compliance gaps.

Problem 5: The cost of getting it wrong is high

Engineering software is expensive, so shortfalls are expensive too. And vendors in this space take compliance seriously.

OpenLM's article on software license compliance best practices points to a real example: two Kansas companies sanctioned in 2021 for using unlicensed CATIA software, each paying around $75,000 in fines and restitution to Dassault Systèmes.

That's a reminder that this isn't just theoretical.

What actually helps

The good news is that the fixes aren't mysterious. They mostly come down to visibility and routine.

Get all your license data in one place. This is the single biggest step. Instead of checking six systems, you want one view that covers every vendor.

This is the problem OpenLM was built to solve. It focuses on engineering and specialty software, and according to OpenLM it supports more than 90 license managers. Usage from Autodesk, Bentley, Dassault, Siemens, Ansys, Esri and others can be monitored together. It also integrates with SAM platforms like ServiceNow, so engineering licenses don't sit outside the wider IT asset picture.

Track concurrent usage, not just installs. For floating licenses, peak simultaneous use is what usually matters. Monitoring shows you that number over time.

Hunt down forgotten servers and files. Inventory every license server and license file in the organization. Retire what's no longer needed.

Watch borrowing and idle time. Long borrows and idle sessions affect both compliance and cost. OpenLM's best-practices article specifically recommends choosing a monitoring tool with idle time monitoring and license harvesting for this reason.

Make it easy to do the right thing. If engineers can't get a license when they need one, workarounds follow. Good visibility helps you size license pools properly, so people don't feel the need to improvise.

A quick scenario

A civil and structural engineering firm with five offices decided to check its compliance ahead of a big renewal. They expected to find nothing.

Within a month of monitoring across all their license managers, they found:

• A license server in one office still running an old product version with more seats than the current contract covered.
• Several engineers who borrowed licenses for site work and kept them for weeks.
• A simulation tool installed on far more machines than the node-locked licenses allowed.
• Heavy idle time on two expensive CAD products.

The first and third were real compliance issues. They fixed both before renewal. The borrowing and idle time issues were mostly cost problems, and fixing them meant the firm could renew fewer seats than planned.

One exercise, two outcomes: lower risk and lower cost.

Your starter checklist

• List every license manager in the organization, including regional ones.
• Gather entitlement records for your top five vendors.
• Get usage monitoring in place across those vendors.
• Compare peak concurrent usage with what you own.
• Check installs against node-locked and named-user entitlements.
• Retire old license servers and files.
• Review the full list in OpenLM's 9 compliance best practices and pick the next two to adopt.

The takeaway

Engineering firms don't struggle with compliance because they're careless. They struggle because their software estate is genuinely complicated.

The answer is to make it visible. Once you can see every license, every server, and every user in one place, compliance stops being a scramble and becomes a routine.

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