# Is Your Firm Ready for a Bentley License Review? What SELECT Server Data Says About You There's a moment every IT manager dreads. An email arrives from a software vendor with words like "usage review" or "license reconciliation" in the subject line. Your stomach drops a little. With Bentley, that conversation often feels different from other vendors. Not because Bentley is harsher. It's because Bentley usually already knows a lot about your usage. Let me explain why, and what you can do to walk into that conversation calm instead of scrambling. **Bentley has been watching (politely)** Bentley SELECT Server, or SELECTserver, was built to log usage and send it back to Bentley. That was the deal behind pooled licensing. You got flexibility to install software widely and share licenses, and Bentley got usage data to bill against. Pooled licensing agreements commonly include wording where the subscriber agrees to let Bentley's licensing technology monitor usage and transmit usage data files back to Bentley. In plain English: if you used it, they probably have a record. Bentley's own documentation notes that SELECTserver transmits usage reports daily, or whenever it can connect to Bentley's licensing web services. Third-party descriptions of the data mention things like product IDs, versions, peak usage figures, and machine and user names. The newer Subscription Entitlement Service (SES) goes further, with sign-in per user and near real-time monitoring. Bentley also combines SELECTserver and SES usage for consolidated reporting. So here's the uncomfortable truth. In many cases, the vendor has a clearer view of your Bentley usage than you do. **Why that's a problem** It's not that Bentley's numbers are wrong. They're usually accurate about what was consumed. The problem is that you can't argue with, explain, or plan around data you've never seen. Imagine sitting across from your account manager. They show you a chart: your firm peaked at 32 concurrent users on a product you hold 25 licenses for. You have no idea why. You can't say whether it was a one-off crunch, an idle-session habit, or a team that genuinely needs more seats. You're negotiating blind. Now imagine the same meeting where you already know about that peak. You know it happened in the two weeks before a major highway submission. You know a third of it came from sessions with no real activity. You've already fixed the habit and can show the usage has dropped since. Same data. Very different conversation. **Building your own record** Audit readiness is mostly about having your own version of events. Here's what that looks like in practice. **Know what you own.** Pull together your current Bentley entitlements: products, quantities, licensing model, and renewal dates. This sounds basic, but in many firms it's spread across old emails and a procurement folder. **Know what's installed.** Map out every machine with Bentley software and which versions are on it. Pay special attention to older versions still using SELECTserver. **Know what's used.** This is the part that needs proper tooling. You want usage per product, per user, over time, with peaks and idle time visible. **Know who's responsible.** Someone in your firm should own the Bentley licensing relationship. Not "IT" as a vague concept. A person. **Getting the usage piece right** You've got a few options for the "what's used" part. Bentley's own reporting is the obvious starting point, and SES has improved it considerably. But it only covers Bentley, and it shows consumption more than behavior. Most engineering firms end up adding an independent license management platform. [OpenLM](https://www.openlm.com) is one widely used in this space. It's built for engineering software, supports Bentley alongside more than 60 other license managers, and can run on-premise or in the cloud. The value for audit readiness is straightforward. You have your own historical record of usage, kept in your own system, that you can compare against what the vendor presents. If the numbers match, great, you've confirmed the bill. If they don't, you've got something concrete to discuss. OpenLM also connects into ServiceNow for firms that manage software assets there, which helps if your audit prep sits inside a wider IT asset management process. **A real-world sort of example** A multidisciplinary engineering firm with offices in two countries went through a Bentley usage discussion a couple of years back. They'd been running SELECTserver for older versions and SES for newer ones. Their first instinct was panic. The usage numbers looked high and nobody internally had tracked them. After they put monitoring in place, they found three things. One office had a much higher peak than the other because of a shift pattern that overlapped with the second office's hours. A few legacy installs were being opened just to view drawings. And idle sessions made up a noticeable share of peak usage on their most expensive product. They changed shift overlap slightly, moved viewing work to a free viewer, and started nudging people about idle sessions. By the next review, they had a clean story and a lower peak. No drama. Just data. ### **Your audit-readiness checklist** * Current list of Bentley entitlements and renewal dates. * Inventory of installed Bentley products and versions, including legacy SELECTserver installs. * At least six months of usage history per product, with peaks visible. * Clear owner for the Bentley licensing relationship. * Offboarding process that removes installs and account access. * A habit of reviewing usage quarterly, before Bentley's report arrives. ### **Last word** Bentley SELECT Server was built on trust. Bentley trusted you to use software sensibly and kept a record to settle up later. The best way to return that trust is simple. Keep your own record too. When the review email arrives, you'll open it with a coffee instead of a cold sweat.