licensing management

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. Read More

Each year, Frost & Sullivan conducts intensive best practices research to determine how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership.  By analyzing each company’s performance and comparing it to its top competitors, they assign performance ratings.  Frost & Sullivan also looks at the key industry challenges that can be addressed by product line strategy.  An effective product line strategy for the software license management industry has to not only accommodate new business models, but also readily support new deployment options, new platforms, and new product architecture.

SafeNet trumped its competitors in five key areas: breadth of product line, size of addressable customer base, impact on customer value, impact on market share, and breadth of applications and markets served.  SafeNet’s Sentinel suite of products, including Sentinel HASP, Sentinel RMS, Sentinel EMS and Sentinel Cloud, provides its customers with a one-stop licensing experience that fully addresses a variety of use cases, platforms, business models and deployment scenarios. Read More

Story time. Some time ago I worked with a software company who was mostly convinced switching software licensing technologies would be in their best interest. One problem though: their hesitation was not around cost (financial investment, development effort, support impact, external and internal impact) but instead revolved around the thought of to giving their customers “double entitlements”. The concern was that each customer would already hold a set of license keys that would run the current and prior versions of the software and would *then* be given an additional full set of keys for the new version sitting on new technology, thereby doubling the number of software licenses their customers could potentially run. Sidebar: switching licensing technologies does not automatically result in double entitlements. Read More

There are many virtualization related debates underway right now (even as you read this!), but one that I recently came across seemed to stand out above the others. It was all about who should be dictating the direction software companies should take to tackle software licensing and virtualization.  Treating that topic independently, there are essentially 3 players involved: Read More