<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  PipeLay > Licensing Options > Network Licencing >
Licensing as a Service

PipeLay 3.5.1 onwards provides an option to use a web-hosted licensing system, also known as "Licensing as a Service" (LaaS). This system offers additional flexibility to the PipeLay users by enabling ready to use licensing entitlements with less set-up overheads compared to traditional dongles. Three licensing types are available with PipeLay LaaS:

▪Perpetual Ownership

▪Rental

▪Token Based

Note that web-based licensing, which involves the delivery of a software license, plus associated computational power and storage facilities, is a distinct license model for acquiring PipeLay and should not be confused with cloud  licensing.

What Is WEB-HOSTED Licensing?

Web-hosted licensing, simply put, is where licensing entitlements are stored and checked on the cloud, via an internet connection, and so it does not require the use of an “on premise” dongle to run the software. Note however that it does require a relatively stable internet connection.

One of the added benefits of web-based licensing is that it offers the ability to use the software on any PC which has an internet connection, and so a user can access their PipeLay licenses even when they are outside the company office or network.

Please note that the web-based license provider for PipeLay is NetLicensing and more information can be found on their website at netlicensing.io

PERPETUAL Ownership & RENTAL Licenses

Under web-based licensing perpetual and rental licenses use floating seats. A floating seat is one that can be used anywhere as long as the seat is available and the user has an internet connection. While in use, the seat is not available to other users. A floating seat is held by a user until PipeLay exits.

To elaborate a bit further, with perpetual cloud licenses a PipeLay license file is provided to the user which points to the cloud based license server and the PipeLay Network Licensing Client will get the license from the server as shown in the figure below.

A rental license will get the license from the cloud based server in the same manner as the perpetual and will show the remaining amount of days on the license on the title bar of the PipeLay user interface as shown in the figure below.

Both perpetual and rental licenses require a reasonably stable internet connection, but that being said they can also tolerate some level of intermittent connectivity.

Token-based Licenses

The cloud based licensing system also provides a Pay-Per-Use (token based) license model to facilitate users who do not need a full time rental license and may only need to use PipeLay on an ad hoc basis. With this model users must purchase a number of tokens upfront and then these tokens are consumed as the user runs installation stages in PipeLay. In other words, a number of tokens will be consumed on the successful completion of each installation stage in an PipeLay analysis component.

Token consumption does not occur when post-processing type analyses are ran on the installation stages, only when the analyses are actually performing finite element solutions. Also, if finite element solutions fail to converge then no token consumption occurs.

The quantity of remaining tokens can be viewed on the title bar of the PipeLay user interface as shown in the figure below.

The token usage and remaining token amount will be reported in the PipeLay Progress Tab during an analysis as shown in the figures below.

 

               

NOTES:

•Token consumption is on an installation stage basis so analyses with a large number of installation stages can consume tokens at an increased rate, especially when stages are ran in parallel. If users intend on running a large amount of installation stages on a regular basis then it may be more cost effective to acquire a rental or perpetual license.

•Token-based licenses require relatively stable internet connectivity. If a connection is unavailable, users will be unable to run an analysis as installation stage token consumption cannot take place.