Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz recently proclaimed that “Mobile is eating the world” – and it’s not hard to see why. Demand for mobile software is at an all-time high, with Android and iOS completely dominating the mobile OS market. In fact, Android’s sizeable market share accounts for more than 80% of smartphones and 60% of tablets worldwide.
While ISVs continue the move from traditional dongle support to software licensing and cloud licensing, it is important to note that many software vendors still use dongles as part of their overall licensing strategy. This creates an opportunity to improve how the back office functions for software activation, tracking, reporting, and license renewal, across all methods of licensing. Having a unified back-office for licensing and entitlement management that includes support for dongle, software licensing and cloud applications would greatly improve how effectively ISVs manage their offerings.
When is the last time that you used a new USB drive or external USB device, and the device asked you to download a driver to make it functional? If you’re like me, downloading device drivers is a distant memory. USB devices have gotten smarter and more user-friendly.
This raises the following question: why shouldn’t I enjoy the same seamless user experience in my software protection USB dongle?