As part of product and professional services engagements with OpenLM initiatives, I architected SaaS lifecycle services for license activation, telemetry, and automated reclamation. These solutions helped enterprise customers regain control of license spend, automate entitlement workflows, and surface usage insights to product & finance teams.
Problem Statement
Organizations using commercial engineering and analytics tools frequently over-provision licenses or leave them assigned when not actively used. This creates unnecessary spend and governance risks. Manual license process and lack of telemetry made it hard to reconcile consumption vs entitlement.
License costs spiralling without visibility into actual use.
Manual activation/deactivation processes causing long lead-times.
Inability to reclaim unused licenses safely without interrupting users.
Approach
We built a SaaS lifecycle and telemetry platform designed around three pillars: visibility, automation, and policy-driven reclamation. Workstreams included telemetry ingestion, entitlement reconciliation, automation rules, and actionable dashboards for finance and product owners.
Ingested usage events from clients' agents into a central event stream (Kafka / managed pubsub).
Normalized events and correlated them with license entitlement data to produce accurate utilisation metrics.
Implemented policy-driven automation: idle-window detection, safe suspension, and reclaim workflows with human-in-the-loop approvals.
Exposed APIs for activation / deactivation and integrated with SSO / provisioning systems.
Solution — What We Delivered
Centralized license registry that stores entitlements, seat assignments, and policy flags.
Streaming telemetry pipeline for near-real-time usage events and session analytics.
Automation engine for lifecycle actions (suspend, reclaim, notify) with audit trails.
Dashboards & recommendations to identify reclaimable licenses and optimize spend.
Integrations: SSO, ITSM (ServiceNow type), billing, and alerting systems.
Representative Tech Stack
Kafka / Managed PubSub, Spark/Flink streaming, Postgres / ClickHouse for serving, Kafka Connect / CDC for entitlements sync, Docker & Kubernetes, Prometheus & Grafana, and a React+Next frontend for dashboards and admin.
Business Outcomes
Recovered license spend: single-customer engagements reclaimed mid-double-digit % of wasted licenses within quarters.
Reduced manual provisioning lead-times from days to minutes via automation APIs.
Improved governance and auditability — full audit trail for license actions and human approvals.
Actionable recommendations allowed product & finance teams to negotiate better license terms.