software entitlement management

As your company continues to grow, you may find that you have acquired a varied collection of licensing systems.  Each product line has its own registration process, and its own set of problems. This may be manageable for awhile, but eventually multiple product lines affect almost every department within your company, and the repercussions are reaching your customers. A disparate licensing system can hinder internal communication and wipe out resources.  Your staff is no longer focusing on your core competencies, but rather spending all of their time on your licensing system.

With an entitlement management system, streamline your back office and create one cohesive licensing system to maintain. Here are the 5 ways that an entitlement management system can help you empower your employees to work smarter, not harder. Read More

BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) offer tremendous growth upside for many companies. Independent Software Vendors are no different. This fact leads to familiar conversations happening inside many software companies. “We need to enter the high growth markets. However, we have no licensing or our current licensing is not designed to focus upon piracy. We don’t want to invest all that effort only to end up giving our product away”. Read More

The software industry is in the midst of a dramatic shift. No software publisher big or small will be left unaffected by enterprise and consumer end-users’ growing preference to consume their software as on-demand services. According to industry-leading analyst firm IDC, by 2010 nearly 65% of new product from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services and nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery.  As a software publisher, the question you should be asking yourself is not how to avoid the cloud – but how to navigate a migration to the cloud for all or some of your applications as quickly and efficiently as possible. In a recent presentation, Saugatuck Technology’s Mike West made it quite clear that every aspect of an ISV’s business will be impacted by a shift to SaaS, from business planning and management, technology development and operational processes, and even corporate culture. Read More

I don’t have many pet peeves in life. Okay, my kids will tell you I’m the typical dad who gets irritated when they leave the lights on in their rooms and monkey with the thermostat. But besides that, I roll with things pretty well.

Then comes perhaps my only work-related peeve: the misuse of the term “license”. I am sure it stems from my IBM days where teams of gifted lawyers spend oodles of cycles slicing, dicing, chopping and julienning seemingly simple concepts and produce software license agreements of Tolstoyian proportions. 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