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Prakash Panjwani

Prakash Panjwani

SVP & GM, Software Rights Management - SafeNet

Prakash Panjwani currently serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Rights Management Division. In this role, Prakash oversees product management, product marketing, engineering, and other supporting functions for SafeNet’s industry leading Software Rights Management portfolio, as well as Authentication Solutions portfolio.

Prakash joined SafeNet as Vice President in Worldwide Embedded Sales in September of 2002, and was responsible for SafeNet's sales to leading OEM companies around the globe. He has since held several executive positions at SafeNet, including Senior Vice President of Operations and General Manager of other business units.

Prior to joining SafeNet, Prakash spent more than four years at Certicom Corporation in various management positions, including Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development. Previously, he also served at Motorola Inc. and Telcordia (formerly Bellcore). With an in-depth knowledge of the information security industry, including broad-ranging technologies such as software and hardware solutions, security protocols, cryptography and PKI, as well as general knowledge of the investment community, he often speaks at investor conferences and seminars focused on information security.

Prakash holds a Masters degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Information Networking and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.

5 Posts

May 10
2012 

There’s No Debate: ISVs Need to Consider Pricing, Virtualization Options

by Prakash Panjwani

If you live in US or follow the news about US, you know that we are in middle of a political election season. You can’t go a week without watching the back and forth between Presidential candidates over topics that range from relevant to mundane, game-changing to ridiculous. One of the more serious topics (and probably at the top of the voters’ mind) is job creation, or the lack thereof. The US economy is growing but job growth is not keeping pace. At the heart of the issue is productivity: when the chips were down during the peak of recession, most companies learned to be very efficient. That is, they learned how to get more out of the resources they have. One of those efficiencies is increasing use of IT to improve productivity of employees. You could say job growth has given way to use of more software systems and tools.

Apr 10
2012 

Putting Customers First: Why ISVs Need Flexible Pricing Models

by Prakash Panjwani

I have spent much of my last seven years promoting software licensing and monetization. Of course, market dynamics have changed over those years and our solutions and thinking has evolved accordingly. More recently, with the launch of Sentinel Cloud in 2011, we have been very focused on encouraging our customers to start aggressively adopting usage-based models – primarily because their customers – end users – want such pricing schemes.

So, you can probably imagine my reaction as the following story unfolded….

Nov 8
2011 

In Licensing, The Best Defense is a Great Offense

by Prakash Panjwani

Diehard baseball fans like me have found ourselves at the end of one of the best seasons Major League Baseball has had in years.  What truly distinguished this season is that the old adage of “defense wins titles” didn’t quite pan out. Instead, we got to see teams with ordinary starting pitching somehow make it to the championship games.

Focusing on offense over defense seems to be the trend lately in the software world too.

Sep 12
2011 

How Wobbly is your Business?

by Prakash Panjwani

Here is a term that has made it into our vocabulary a bit too much lately – “wobbly”. Suddenly everything is wobbly – our economy, stock market, jobs market.  The obvious connotation is “uncertainty” but wobbly has also become a cop-out term for not knowing where something is headed. It is a sign of times we are in – or so it feels. Uncertainty in economy leads to uncertainty everywhere else.

My advice – something I try to follow rigorously at work and and personally  – when you are surrounded by uncertainty, do the opposite – be decisive. This is especially true for high tech companies.

Apr 27
2010 

The Three P’s of Licensing

by Prakash Panjwani

I don’t know if they teach this in every MBA program, but I am sure you have heard that every business case can be boiled down to a certain number of “P”s. It is just a question of how many…some have 4 P’s, some have 5; but in this world of Twitter and brevity, I am going to go with the three that matter most when you think about creating licensing approaches for software: Piracy, Portability, and Profitability.