11 years ago
Give Peace a Chance with Abstraction Layers
As an engineering and product management team tasked with designing license enforcement into your products, you have many decisions around how your products will interact with the licensing code. Here’s a proven technique that will help you control how licensing gets implemented across your product lines while making the product teams’ lives easier at the same time: build an abstraction layer. Read More
12 years ago
Building Your License Enforcement Business Case, Part 2
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. Read More
12 years ago
Show Me the Money! Revenue Recognition Best Practices (Part 2)
In my last blog entry (Show Me The Money, Part 1) we looked at a number of factors that play into software revenue recognition when a vendor (ISV) introduces electronic license enforcement into their product lines. Part 1 focused on the principles and mechanics behind giving customers access to the software upon order execution so that the ISV may recognize revenue. Part 1 concluded by bringing another key element into the revenue recognition equation: time. Time can affect revenue recognition in a number of ways:
- We have the time required by the customer to actually get their license keys after the ISVs claims to have given them “access” to the software.
- We have the software’s ability to run by default without a license key for a temporary amount of time. Does that count as “access”?
- We have some ISVs selling perpetual entitlements but wanting or needing to deliver license keys that expire annually. Does the customer really have access to what they bought?
