CiRBA on Wednesday announced the general availability of a Software License Control System that enables organizations to reduce the costs associated with processor-based software licensing by an average of 55%.

CiRBA CTO and co-founder Andrew Hillier noted that "with the shift to data center class software licensing for virtual infrastructure, where licensing an entire physical host server allows an unlimited number of instances to be run, licensing optimization is now becoming a capacity management challenge."

The Software License Control module is an add-on to CiRBA's Capacity Control Console and optimizes VM placements in virtual and cloud infrastructure in order to:

1. Reduce the number of processors/hosts requiring licenses.
CiRBA determines optimized VM placements to both maximize the density of licensed components on physical hosts and isolate these licensed VMs from those not requiring the licenses.

2. Contain the licensed VMs on the licensed physical servers.
CiRBA's analytics restrict placements of licensed VMs to the designated physical servers over time in order to ensure licensing compliance and continued efficiency.

CiRBA also enables organizations to profile software licensing, configuration, policy and utilization requirements for new VMs that are coming into an environment, to route these VMs to appropriately licensed physical servers, and to reserve capacity for those VMs through its Bookings Management System. This is essential when managing dynamic virtual and cloud environments, and also provides visibility into requirements to grow or modify license pools based on upcoming demand. Through this booking and reservation process, CiRBA ensures that density remains optimized by considering both the bookings and organic growth in the environment, and using this to forecast the impact on capacity and licensing.

All of this translates directly in to savings that can be realized through lower expenditures for renewals, deferral of new software license purchases, and reduced yearly maintenance.  These savings can easily be in the millions of dollars, particularly on expensive operating system, database and middleware platforms.