Abstract

Have you ever wondered how to view the usage of all of the different toolboxes from MathWorks in your organization? As technology becomes more complicated and vendors expand their offerings, there continues to be more overlap between capabilities of different vendors. MathWorks now has over 100 toolboxes, making it difficult to determine which ones are truly needed in an organization. Thus, a natural consequence of these three trends: 1) Companies rely more on software than ever before 2) Software surrounds us in our everyday life 3) The tools used by engineers and scientists are evolving faster than ever Does a company need to invest in more expensive software tools to accelerate the pace of ideas becoming a reality? This is sometimes difficult in organizations to quantify the value of such investments. Since MathWorks products depend on MATLAB for proper function, it is imperative to ensure there are enough MATLAB licenses for all users. Tracking MATLAB license usage from the log files can be tedious and error-prone, leading to incorrect assumptions. In this talk, you will see how a technical and scientific computing consulting company quantifies the value of using MathWorks tools in their business model and internal team training. On this session, Gareth Thomas will expound and share his experiences in effectively tracking the usage of MATLAB and its different Toolboxes and using that to drive internal discussions of the value that software usage metering brings to the company. He will share his insights on how to: • Automatically charge based on the number of hours in using MATLAB • Change the internal behavior and training of technical consultants • Modify business model based on customer’s usage data • Common challenges and how to solve them • The fundamental steps in optimizing licenses that could help drive internal discussions; and • The value of software usage metering to an organization.