Calculated lifecycle data now available in the Technopedia API

Note:This feature is available with Technopedia.

Technopedia provides enrichment data such as lifecycle dates—General Availability (GA), End of Life (EOL), and Obsolete dates (the last date in which any support is provided by the vendor, captured the way it was published by the vendor)—in addition to software releases. Flexera’s Content Team curates these dates from various sources (direct from vendors' websites or other reliable sources). However, not every vendor provides this information publicly, leaving Technopedia customers facing the challenge of having to manage releases with missing lifecycle dates.

Calculated Lifecycle supplements the curated, research-based dates by introducing dynamic calculations on dates for a particular release based on existing dates from other related releases (such as releases under the same product, family, suite, vendor, category, and so on). These calculations provide additional data points to customers who need to have explicit dates in their EOL management use-cases, while at the same time still maintain full transparency that they are calculated dates.

Customers coming from Data Platform will see this an improvement to the existing Calculated Lifecycle Date concept in Data Platform where the settings provide the ability to hard-code a very rough global parameter (such as setting EOL dates equal to GA dates + 47 months) which does not give a very reliable prediction across various products/vendors. Additionally, these Calculated Lifecycle Dates from Flexera One Technopedia will soon be made available in various data consumption methods within Flexera One, including IT Visibility's dashboards and reports, IT Visibility exports, as well as the IT Visibility API.

Using Flexera One’s Technopedia API, you can now manage software releases with missing lifecycle dates. The Flexera One Technopedia API adds the following support for calculated lifecycle data to its SoftwareLifecycle dataset:

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New calculated date fields—These fields contain calculated values based on an algorithm that picks the best scenario (“case”) to calculate the missing dates. Each date field—General Availability, End of Life, Obsolete—has its own calculated date field.

Important:These dates are calculated, and not actual dates as published by the vendor.

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New calculated “case” fields—These fields provide information on how the dates were calculated—whether they were calculated based on dates from other releases under the same product, calculated based on dates from other releases within the same suite, and so on.

For more information, see Technopedia API in the Flexera One API Reference as well as the SoftwareLifecycle dataset for definitions of the new fields.