AppPoints in plain English: who costs what in MAS 9

Most teams overspend on AppPoints the same way: everyone who might ever need Maximo gets authorized access at the top tier. It feels safe in the licence workshop. Three years later it’s the most expensive decision in the project.

In part 4 we created Tessa, a planner, and made her authorized because she’s in Maximo all day. This part explains what that choice costs, what the alternatives are, and how to count what your own people need. It’s written for managers who sign the order and for the administrators who live with it.

In short: your pool pays for three things. Installs, authorized users and administrators hold their points all the time. Concurrent users borrow points while they’re logged in and hand them back when they leave. Self-Service requesters, and development or test copies of what you already run in production, cost nothing. When the pool runs dry, compliance enforcement decides whether the next concurrent user waits or gets in as overage, and the AppPoints Usage dashboard shows how close you are.

1. The short answer

You buy a pool of AppPoints, and every application in Maximo Application Suite draws on it. Each user takes points according to two things: how they’re licensed (authorized or concurrent) and what they can reach (Self-Service, Limited, Base or Premium). Some add-ons also take points the moment they’re installed, before anyone logs in.

That’s it. This part covers the people: how each user is licensed, what they can reach, and the choices that make the pool efficient. Part 5b covers everything else that draws on the pool: custom applications, installs, the AI service, and how to watch it all.

2. From licences to a pool

Maximo licensing has moved in three steps.

Maximo 7.6 and earlier: products and seats. You bought Maximo Asset Management, then separate licences for Scheduler, Spatial, Linear, Calibration, an industry solution and so on. People came as Authorized, Concurrent, Limited Use or Express Use seats. If you wanted to try something new, it meant a new quote and a new contract.

MAS 8 and 9: one pool. MAS replaces that with one currency. The same pool pays for Manage, Monitor, Health, Predict, Visual Inspection and the rest, so moving a team onto a new application is a security change, not a purchase. In IBM’s words, an AppPoint is simply “a common unit of value”. Scheduler, Linear and Calibration became part of Manage with no separate licence, while some add-ons, such as Spatial, take install points (more in part 5b).

MAS 9.2, and MAS as a service: measured. The pool stays, but you can now see and meter it. 9.2 adds the AppPoints Usage dashboard, entitlement settings for custom applications and a metered AI service. And if IBM runs MAS for you, points are charged by the clock hour, after the event (more in part 5b).

How your existing 7.6 licences convert into AppPoints is a conversation with IBM or your IBM partner, and it depends on your contract. What this article can do is help you walk into that conversation knowing what you need.

3. Two questions for every user

First: how are they licensed?

• Authorized is one specific person. Their points are held from the day the user is created, so they can always log in, however busy the pool is. The entitlement belongs to that person: it can’t be shared, and it can only be reassigned if it moves to someone else for good.
• Concurrent points are taken only while the person is logged in, and go back to the pool when they log out or their session times out. Someone logged in on a laptop and a phone at the same time still counts once.

Second: what can they reach? There are four tiers, and each one includes everything below it:

There’s no ratio between the tiers, so you can have as many Self-Service users as you like, and any mix of authorized and concurrent at any tier.

You don’t pick the tier by hand. MAS works it out from the user’s security groups: the most demanding application in all their groups, combined, sets the tier. On the user’s Access & license tab, each security group shows its License impact, and the License summary explains the result.

That’s the lever most teams miss. If a user is Base only because one forgotten group gives them edit rights to a fourth module, removing that group can drop them to Limited. The licence follows the security design, so fix the groups, not the licence.

4. Authorized or concurrent? Do the sums

An authorized user costs a fraction of a concurrent one at the same tier: 2 against 5 at Limited, 3 against 10 at Base, 5 against 15 at Premium. But authorized points are held all the time, and concurrent points only while people are logged in. So the answer depends on how many of a group are on at once.

The rule of thumb: concurrent is cheaper when the most people logged in at the same time is below 40% of the group at Limited, 30% at Base, or a third at Premium. Above that, authorized wins.

Twelve technicians on three shifts, with up to five logged in at once, are cheaper authorized: 36 points against 50. Thirty supervisors who dip in to approve, with at most six on at once, are cheaper concurrent: 60 against 90. Put both groups in one plan and the mix, 96 points, beats all authorized (126) and all concurrent (110).

5. Administrators are always authorized

Suite administration has its own entitlement: Admin Base at 10 points or Admin Premium at 15. Administrators are always authorized, so the concurrent option is simply not available for them.

The good news is that the admin points also cover application access. IBM’s own example: a Base administrator, at 10 points, can be given Premium application access and use Maximo Predict, which would otherwise need 15. The admin value replaces the application value; they don’t add together.

Two admin rules worth knowing: creating or editing Cognos reports and dashboards needs an Admin Base user, and IBM allows up to three of them. And as part 4 suggested, keep the people who create users separate from the people who run the system. It’s better security, and admin entitlement isn’t cheap.

Which admin entitlement? IBM’s guidance maps Admin Base (10 points) to application administrators, who look after Manage and the other applications, and Admin Premium (15 points) to suite administrators, who run MAS itself. Keep Premium for the few people who genuinely run the suite.

Setting one up. On the user’s Access & license tab, alongside the admin entitlement, there are three kinds of additional access. Switch on only what each person needs:

• System configuration: edit access to the catalog, the suite configurations and the licence consumption settings covered in part 5b.
• IDP management: how people sign in and how MAS talks to the outside world: OIDC, LDAP and SAML, SMTP, user registry sync, UI customisation and certificates. It doesn’t include deploying applications or database connections.
• API key management: creating and managing API keys for integrations. A key acts as a user, so you need the same access type as the key’s user to manage it.

6. Limited users: any three modules, and a view of the rest

Limited is the tier that saves the most money and causes the most confusion. A Limited user picks any three Manage modules and has full use of the applications in them.

Seven modules can never be one of the three: Planning and Scheduling, Administration, Integration, Security, System Configuration, and in the suite, Application Administration and Access and Usage.

Outside their three modules, a Limited user can still view records read-only, run and view reports, change the status of records, and update the work orders and inspections assigned to them, through Work Order Tracking, Quick Reporting, Labor Reporting or Activities and Tasks. That last part is what many storeroom and trades users need: their own modules in full, plus their own work.

Two traps. Give a Limited user edit rights in a fourth module and they become Base, as the License summary above shows. And if one of your industry solutions or add-ons is installed, its users are Self-Service, Limited or Premium: there are no Base users for those applications.

Don’t be thrown by the module count. The License summary counts every module where the user has edit rights, and MAS’s own tooltip says the count may include modules that don’t affect entitlement. So a Limited user can show more than three and still be Limited. What matters is the tier MAS works out, shown on the left of the summary.

If you remember one thing

Licences follow security. Each user’s tier comes from their security groups, and their cost from whether they’re authorized or concurrent. Design groups by role, keep Limited users to three modules, and make only the all-day users authorized. Do that, and most of your AppPoints decision is made.

What’s next

Part 5b covers the rest of what draws on the pool: custom and cloned applications, installs such as Maximo Optimizer, the AI service, the users you might not count, and how to watch it all on the AppPoints Usage dashboard. You can see all the parts of the series, and what’s coming, on the series page.