When the Autodesk licensing model changed at the beginning of 2023, it meant one thing more than anything else for many companies – uncertainty. RWE, however, quickly turned this challenge into a strategic project. With support from Cideon, it succeeded in consolidating its licence landscape and establishing a new approach that ensures maximum transparency, flexibility and cost-efficiency – across all international companies.

The initial situation made life anything but easy. RWE had a decentralised structures that had grown organically, with all kinds of different licence periods, products and fees. A group-wide user survey was carried out as the basis for the project. “We needed to find out who was using which software, how often and if they planned to keep on using it,” explains Ralf Meinert, an external licence manager at RWE.

STRUCTURE CREATES SCOPE

The first step was to combine all Autodesk licences in one central contract with a standardised licence period that enables centralised licence management and will remain scalable in the future. One element of this was rolling out the Autodesk Premium Plan so that usage data could be evaluated on an anonymised basis and made transparent for the first time.

This served as a basis for systematic differentiation, with frequent users getting permanent licences and occasional users being switched to the Flex Token model. Over 100 staff are now on this payper-use model. Permanent licences that have been freed up have been redistributed to frequent users. “The bottom line is that we have been able to install Autodesk software for many more staff, while being significantly more cost-efficient,” says Meinert.

LONG-TERM VIABILITY

Cideon recognised that, besides needing to work effectively at the present time, the solution must also remain viable over the long term. The Cideon team was therefore involved in both technical implementation and strategic licensing decisions. RWE made a forward-looking investment in additional subscriptions, benefiting from favourable terms and with an eye to future requirements. The result is a scalable, future-proof licensing landscape.

Cideon ensured close, solution-focused communication throughout the entire project – from the needs assessment and the Autodesk Premium Plan rollout all the way through to data-protection-compliant evaluation. The cooperation between various departments also played a key role in the success of the project as a whole.