Automation Anywhere's offline licensing model is built for enterprises operating in air-gaped, internet-restricted, or high-security environments in regulated industries such as government, defence, financial services and regulated manufacturing.

It allows your On-Premises Control Room to consume and enforce license entitlements across all our products without maintaining a direct connection to the Automation Anywhere Cloud license server, so your automation programs run without compromise regardless of your network posture.

In this model, license information is exchanged through a secure and structured file exchange process. A cycle of file exchanges between your Control Room and the Customer Account and License Management (CALM) portal keeps your license entitlements and usage in sync without connectivity and without exposing the Control Room to the internet.

Our preferred option for the customers is to use Cloud-connected licensing. Offline licensing is only for customers that have the air-gap need and is approved on an exception basis.
Note: Offline licensing is supported only for On-Premises Control Room deployments running version v.40 or later and requires a pre-approval.

How it works

Offline license is supported for air-gaped customers using an exception-based approval process. Such customers with genuine use case and a valid reason are pre-approved for offline licenses. Such pre-approved customer will see an option on CALM to download an approved and secure token to enable On-Premises offline Control Room for offline licences. This token is downloaded from CALM and installed on On-Premises Control Room. This action enables the On-Premises Control Room to begin the process to create a license file request and then install the offline license file on the On-Premises Control Room.

This file exchange cycle should be repeated every time a change in entitlement is needed and at upsell and renewal events with no need to re-provision the Control Room.

The offline licensing lifecycle consists of four stages:

  • Request offline licensing for your account: Talk to your sales representatives to request approval for offline licensing.
  • Setup your Control Room for offline licensing: Install the On-Premises Control Room, download an enablement token from CALM, and install it on the Control Room. This is a one-time setup. See Set up your Control Room for offline licensing
  • Request and install a license:
    1. Generate a License File Request (LFR) on the Control Room, upload it to CALM.
    2. Create or configure an offline license file based on your entitlement needs.
    3. Download the resulting Offline License File (OLF) and install it on the Control Room.
    See Request and install an offline license
  • Reconfigure your licenses: Repeat the LFR-to-OLF cycle whenever you need to change your license configuration for adding, reducing entitlements, or during renewal and upsell event. See Reconfigure offline licenses

No live calls are made to the Cloud license server at any point. All license enforcement, usage tracking, and credit consumption are handled locally by the Control Room using the installed OLF.

Once installed, the OLF is the Control Room's sole source of license authority. Bots and users consume licenses as usual, but no live calls are made to the Cloud license server. Usage data, such as bot runs, volume consumption is tracked locally using an encrypted, tamper-proof mechanism.

License details, status, usage and expiry date are visible in the Administration > License Management page.

Exception-based approval

Offline licensing is available through an exception-based approval process. Your account must be pre-approved by Automation Anywhere before you can access the offline licensing workflow in CALM. Typical qualifying criteria include:
  • Your organization operates in a regulated industry where internet connectivity is restricted by compliance requirements and is not an option.
  • Your Control Room is deployed in a fully air-gapped or offline environment. Cloud-connected licensing is not a viable option due to security or network policy constraints. Control Room is on v.40 or above.

All legacy file-license customers will eventually need to move to either offline licensing (if approved) or GUID-based Cloud licensing (preferred).

Key terms

Term Definition
CALM Customer Account & License Management is the Automation Anywhere portal which is used to manage license entitlements, download tokens, and generate offline license files.
Enablement token A secure, signed identifier generated by CALM to enable On-Premises Control Room for offline licences. Valid for 24 hours from the time of download.
License File Request (LFR)
A file generated after the offline token is installed on the On-Premises Control Room. LFR starts the offline license installation cycle, the generated LFR file is specific to the Control Room it was generated for. This file contains Control Room identifier, the Control Room's public key and current license entitlement and consumption state. LFR is then uploaded to CALM against a Control Room License GUID to generate the offline license file for the specific on-premises Control Room.
Note: A new LFR is required for every offline license cycle, such as renewal, upsell, or configuration change. Once used, an LFR becomes invalid and cannot be reused.
Offline License File (OLF) A file generated by CALM based on the LFR, containing the desired license entitlements and duration validity period, used to activate or renew offline licenses on the Control Room. The OLF must be installed within 7 days of the first LFR generation for that cycle, and within 48 hours of the most recent LFR generation.