Category Archives

42 Posts for Entitlement Management

Mar 28
2012 

Do software vendors intentionally allow ways to bypass their enforcement mechanism?

by David DiMillo

This is a juicy question was posed on Quora (http://b.qr.ae/HmF392). I was intrigued by a couple of the responses and added my own.  Here is my view…

The answer is yes but mostly no. Confused?

Here’s how it usually works…

First, software vendors separate compliance strategy from piracy prevention because they are inherently different beasts. This can be done by placing their customers along a compliance continuum.  On the left you have customers who go to lengths to be compliant and will gladly pay for software they use regardless of whether the software has license enforcement or not. On the right you have users who intentionally use pirated software and wouldn’t pay for it if they couldn’t steal it. The vendor’s focus is clearly on the left end of the scale since this offers the largest revenue opportunity.  The right is often nothing more than noise.

When vendors introduce license enforcement, the most common philosophy (by far) is to consider the enforcement a tool that will help keep their honest customers doing the right thing and to facilitate creative licensing models. All software license enforcement tools have some level of vulnerability. However, the software market usually considers the higher-end commercial enforcement products more than adequate to cover ~90%+ of their continuum, working from left to right.

That 10% is essentially the topic of the original question posed in this post. The software vendor asks itself if it really cares about investing additional time and resources making the enforcement more air-tight to further prevent piracy by users who would never pay them.

All said, there is always a point of diminishing return and vendors choose to not care a whole lot about usage where they’d never see any revenue.

I agree with the premise that many companies would rather see users stealing their software than paying a competitor. However, applying the notion of the compliance continuum, the real money is typically on the left end of the scale with companies that wouldn’t use pirated software in the first place so the revenue in question is likely a fudge factor at best.

What do you think?

Mar 1
2012 

5 Ways that an Entitlement Management System Can Help Your Company Work Smarter, Not Harder

by Alex Lating

As your company continues to grow, you may find that you have acquired a varied collection of licensing systems.  Each product line has its own registration process, and its own set of problems. This may be manageable for awhile, but eventually multiple product lines affect almost every department within your company, and the repercussions are reaching your customers. A disparate licensing system can hinder internal communication and wipe out resources.  Your staff is no longer focusing on your core competencies, but rather spending all of their time on your licensing system.

With an entitlement management system, streamline your back office and create one cohesive licensing system to maintain. Here are the 5 ways that an entitlement management system can help you empower your employees to work smarter, not harder.

Feb 21
2012 

Frost and Sullivan Presents the 2011 Global Product Line Strategy Award in Software License Management to SafeNet

by Alex Lating

Each year, Frost & Sullivan conducts intensive best practices research to determine how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership.  By analyzing each company’s performance and comparing it to its top competitors, they assign performance ratings.  Frost & Sullivan also looks at the key industry challenges that can be addressed by product line strategy.  An effective product line strategy for the software license management industry has to not only accommodate new business models, but also readily support new deployment options, new platforms, and new product architecture.

SafeNet trumped its competitors in five key areas: breadth of product line, size of addressable customer base, impact on customer value, impact on market share, and breadth of applications and markets served.  SafeNet’s Sentinel suite of products, including Sentinel HASP, Sentinel RMS, Sentinel EMS and Sentinel Cloud, provides its customers with a one-stop licensing experience that fully addresses a variety of use cases, platforms, business models and deployment scenarios.

Feb 20
2012 

Building Your License Enforcement Business Case, Part 2

by David DiMillo

My last blog discussed building a business case for implementing a software license enforcement system.  A key component of the case should be a plan to minimize negative impact on the customer base. This article offers a handful of practices designed to help you ease your customer roll-out.  While not every practice can apply to all cases and to all business, each should provide some food for thought.

Jan 25
2012 

Sentinel Cloud Wins CODiE Award for Best DRM Solution!

by Michelle Nerlinger

 

Last night, the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) announced the winners of the 2012 CODiE awards – an awards program 27 years in the making dedicated to recognizing excellence in the business software, digital content, and education technology industries. I am pleased to announce that SafeNet’s software licensing and entitlement management solution for cloud services, Sentinel Cloud, was awarded the industry’s Best Digital Rights Management Solution CODiE award!

SafeNet's CODiE Award
Prakash Panjwani with SafeNet’s CODiE Award for Best DRM Solution
Oct 5
2011 

Does Your Software Licensing Solution Offer Interoperability?

by Jam Khan

Rarely does an IT system work better in a silo, so a dialogue about the benefits of interoperability seems as redundant as making the case for world peace. Interoperability is a widely used, and often abused, term, but for those that deal with it at a practical level, with poorly integrated systems, it can be somewhat of a holy grail. This is particularly true for electronic license and entitlement management systems.

Electronic licenses and entitlements are unique in that they require coordination between IT, Operations, Product Management and Engineering. They must be integrated into the fabric of a software company’s products, and work seamlessly with order processing and fulfillment systems.

Jun 14
2011 

Entitlements vs. Licenses: Setting the Record Straight

by Russ Hubbard

“What’s an Entitlement?”

In recent meetings with leading technology firms, this very question has surfaced several times.  It’s both interesting and intriguing to watch the interplay of definitional debate amongst functional users with vastly different hopes of what “entitlement” could mean.

Perhaps the most universal insight was this: 

The practical application for how one can use entitlements to enable business processes and new customer experiences was often the most overlooked aspect of the debate. 

Jun 8
2011 

Sentinel Cloud – the Evaluation Experience

by Jake Fox

The SentinelCloud team has been working hard to build and launch the latest addition to SafeNet’s family of Sentinel Software Monetization Solutions,  Sentinel Cloud Services.  While the service successfully made the transition from Beta to GA earlier this year, the team remains hard at work focused on customer evaluations and getting new customers up to speed, while at the same time planning and developing the roll out of new functionality over our quarterly release schedule.

Getting back to our interactions with customers … feedback has been nearly universally positive.  We have heard from customers of all types and sizes. .  Sentinel Cloud has appealed to  SaaS startups, transitioning on-premise software vendors,  and equipment manufacturers large and small. I would like to highlight one prospect who has completed their evaluation of Sentinel Cloud.

Jun 6
2011 

Customer Intimacy Will Drive Old School Licensing to the Cloud

by David DiMillo

“It works, but it is old school”. That is how I’ve heard many business leaders describe their longstanding licensing implementations lately.   So what is next for this space?  As a long time software licensing business and implementation consultant I have the opportunity work with some of the industry’s leading minds in this area and can confidently say that I have seen the future of software license enforcement and it revolves around, you guessed it, the cloud.