Blue Prism Licensing Question

[ZdravkoBotushan]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to fully understand BP licensing, however, I am a little bit confused with running multiple processes on a single machine.

Imagine this situation:

There are 2 virtual machines set up. I have 2 processes which all (have background run type objects). 

Virtual machine should be scheduled from 9 AM to 6 PM and will run 3 instances of Process1 at the same time and the second VM will run 7 instances of Process2 at the same time.

Would that need 2 licenses or 10 licenses?

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Zdravko Botushanov
Senior RPA Consultant
Human+
Europe/Sofia
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[bruce.liu]

Hi Zdravko,

Blue Prism license essentially limits the number of concurrent sessions you are allowed to run in a Blue Prism environment. A session is a bot executing a Blue Prism process. A session starts when it enters pending state. A session ends when the process exits running state. Such sessions can be created in a single bot or in different bots.

In your example, you did not specify the length of each session. To simplify the explanation, let us firstly assume all sessions would run from 9am to 6pm continuously. This means between these 2 machines 10 concurrent sessions are created in the environment, therefore the required number of license is 10. If the duration of each session is much shorter and you have the ability to avoid running them concurrently, the number of required license can be much smaller than 10.

Through smart scheduling, there is an opportunity to improve the overall license utilisation in a Blue Prism environment. A common strategy is to avoid starting all sessions simultaneously. Consider moving some non-essential work to off peak time would also help relieve the license requirement.

Hope this helps.

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Bruce Liu
Senior Product Consultant, Professional Services
Blue Prism
Australia/Sydney
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[zdenek.kabatek · Accepted solution]

Hello, Zdravko,

BP licensing is simple - it allows you to run sessions. Based on the number of licenses/sessions you purchased you can run that number of parallel processes. Regardless of number of machines. So in your case it would be 10 licenses because you run 10 sessions in parallel.

Regards,

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Zdeněk Kabátek
Head of Professional Services
NEOOPS
http://www.neoops.com/
Europe/Prague
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[ZdravkoBotushan]

Sounds good. Thanks for that 🙂

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Zdravko Botushanov
Senior RPA Consultant
Human+
Europe/Sofia
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[John__Carter]

And from a legal perspective, although the license is intended for use in Production, it can be reused for free in non-Production environments, ie Dev and Test.

Partners are provided with a license they can use internally for training etc, but they cannot use it for their own Production processing, or share the license with their clients. Clients must purchase their own license.

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John Carter
Professional Services
Blue Prism
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