Some recent articles I found online got me thinking about a post I made a little under a year ago – One Man’s License is another Man’s Poison.  When I looked at it again – it took me a minute to figure out the chart.

Charts that take more than a few seconds to figure out are not very good charts.

So I decided to re-do it.

Over the last few years Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Software as a Service and advances in hardware performance have made traditional ways of licensing software seem outdated and irrelevant.  If you used to have a per server / per site / per CPU license – multi core, hosted data center virtualized servers have completely ravaged any logic your license model has.

It’s a complicated topic – there are no easy answers.  Changing a license model is fraught with danger and complexity.  Will I cannibalize my revenue stream, will I upset my customer base, how will my revenue recognition change, do our systems support new models, can I get legal to support the new model etc… etc… etc…

Your poor sales guy is faced with explaining and supporting your old model with a new CIO at the customer base who is up to speed on all the new technologies.

Fortunately there are plenty of resources out there to help make the transition.