About Todd Steel

I can tell you with first-hand experience that being a product manager is a tricky and thankless role!  On paper, your task is to understand customer needs and translate them into product requirements. You must then work closely with your R&D team to realize those requirements into a product that hits the market at the right time and at the right price.

Sounds simple, right? The reality is that its way more complex than that, with a myriad of decisions and trade-offs to make along the way.  Product managers have to  react to the realities of what is possible in the time and budget available, and constantly adapt to changing market conditions and competitive moves.

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As ISVs plan to expand their existing on-premise offering and evolving into additional cloud-service offerings, a very important consideration is often overlooked. Is it possible to effectively license the same application as both an on-premise solution and as a cloud-based service?

When looking for the right technology to monetize their offering from on-premise and into the cloud, an ISV must take into consideration these 4 critical aspects of licensing technology: Read More

Often when talking to customers I find the conversation of licensing focused solely on ensuring compliance – that is to say, making sure that their customers don’t run afoul of their license agreement. That’s like buying a Ferrari and never getting out of 1st gear.  Business intelligence is one of many over looked major benefits of a properly configured licensing and entitlement management system. Most would agree that reports from ERP systems are generally not flexible enough nor tailored enough to give Product Managers the information necessary to make intelligent decisions around the future of their product roadmap and packaging strategies. To fully realize the potential of your licensing system it is important to remember the business benefits of tracking the customer use of the license. At a basic level, as a product manager, I want a licensing system to provide me the necessary information to make these decisions: Read More