Category Archives

77 Posts for Software Licensing

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.

May 1
2012 

White Box Encryption Debuts

by R. Colin Johnson

by R. Colin Johnson
Guest Contributor to LicensingLive
Originally published on Smarter Technology.

 

With hackers becoming increasingly sophisticated traditional “black box’ encryption techniques no longer cut it, necessitating a new era of “white box” encryption that is virtually uncrackable.

Traditional encryption techniques assume that the code that executes the security algorithms is hidden, so that hackers can only eavesdrop on what goes into and comes out of the “black box” making it very difficult to crack. Unfortunately, cryptographic algorithms that are executed in software can be extracted by enterprising hackers and executed in the broad daylight of their own or an untrustworthy platform.

Apr 24
2012 

How Sage Software Cured Their Acquisition Headache

by Alex Lating

Acquisitions are good, right? Sure they help your company grow, but what other baggage do they bring? Obviously, you will gladly expand your customer base and available resources. But what are you going to do about an inherited homegrown licensing system that is completely incompatible with yours? Read how one company expanded, without the additional headache of managing disparate licensing systems.

Sage is an international business software, services and support company working primarily with small and medium sized businesses. Throughout the years, acquiring other companies has allowed Sage to continue to expand globally. However, these acquisitions also led to multiple homegrown licensing systems that did not work cohesively.

Apr 13
2012 

Exploring the Four Aspects of a Comprehensive Software Monetization Strategy

by Michelle Nerlinger

Software monetization can be viewed as the adoption of any variety of measures an organization takes in order to increase the profitability of their intellectual property, in this case, software. These tactics can range from sophisticated anti-piracy and IP protection techniques to creative pricing and packaging strategies. It is important to note that no individual software monetization technique is greater than the combination of multiple techniques. No matter what type of software application has been developed or how that application is being delivered to the end-user, a comprehensive software monetization strategy hinges on four key factors – how effectively the software publisher can package, control, manage, and monitor, their offering(s).

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….

Mar 29
2012 

What is Your Software Licensing Headache?

by Jam Khan

Spiceworks is a community of nearly 2 million IT pros with a very active online forum.  Their roles predominantly are network support, help desk and network administration pros; basically, the administrators of software products for their organizations.

One question that was posed to Spiceworks members asked specifically what their biggest headache was with a very well know software vendor.  The responses flew in and these IT pros were consistent in their dissatisfaction with key licensing elements.  As a software vendor, this information is invaluable in setting up your own licensing structure.

I shared the following comment with this group:

“One of the challenges with licensing schemes like some enterprise software vendors is that a lot of burden is placed on the end user to determine what type of licensing works best. Often users feel like they need Ivy league MBAs just to sort through myriad of options. Software companies that use licensing technology with customer experience in mind will look to monitor key data points, such as usage, number of assets etc, in order to determine what the best licensing option is for a particular customer or market segment. However, too often licensing technology is lumped together with enforcement which has a generally negative reaction from customers.

The challenge with large enterprise software vendors is that it’s sheer size and dominance allows it to take a stand that imposes licensing rather than focus more on customer experience. There are ways to use licensing technology in a way to really make the customer’s life a lot easier. We certainly see a lot of that at SafeNet when we engage with software vendors.

Are you keeping the customer in mind when you develop your software licensing process, or are you giving your customers unnecessary headaches too?

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 23
2012 

The Top Five Barriers to Software Monetization Success

by Jennifer Lewis

We recently ran an article on our software monetization channel that discussed the common barriers that prevent ISVs from building an effective monetization strategy.    Are you looking to improve or even define your software monetization plan? Here are five barriers that you should prepare for:

  1. Control
    Control is twofold. Preventing the unauthorized use and distribution of your application protects revenue by ensuring all use of your application is paid for. Equally important is your ability to protect the source code of your application from being exposed to accidental or malicious parties alike in order to prevent code manipulation and reverse engineering. Keeping the product usable and efficient, while providing maximum protection of your valuable IP, can become a big problem for ISV’s if not considered early in the development and software licensing process.
Mar 19
2012 

When someone steals your hardware, you know that it’s missing. When someone is stealing your intellectual property, you may never know.

by Alex Lating

For high-tech equipment manufacturers, times are changing.  It is clear that the inevitable process has begun, hardware is being commoditized and, moving forward, business will be based more and more on software.  Are you ready?

Iritech is a global manufacturer in the biometric authentication equipment and software industry.  As one of only two manufacturers of both the biometric equipment and the identity matching software, Iritech knew right away that preventing reverse-engineering of its identity matching software would be an integral part of its business plan to maintain its unique position in the biometrics market.

Mar 14
2012 

Virtualization and a (New) Conflict of Interests

by Darim Rahmatallah

The ongoing debate around virtualization shows no signs of getting old. Virtualization has always created a ‘conflict of interests’ between those who worry about the technology (the software vendors) and those who enjoy the benefits it offers (the end customers of the aforementioned vendors).

There was a temporary sigh of relief in the world of automated license enforcement when new methods and techniques became available to bind software licenses in a more secure and reliable manner to a virtual machine . Almost overnight, all the concerns and fears of license duplication and misuse (albeit accidental or intentional) went away. The ultimate goal of eliminating the requirements for ISV’s to make a ‘VM/no VM’ decision at the time of deploying or activating their software was finally achieved. End customers could deploy applications where they liked, the vendors no longer had to care, and the world was a happy place.

Or so it seemed….