The licensing policy of the majority of (B2B) software and device vendors falls in one of the following categories: Technical (proactive) In-house licensing solution External/professional software licensing API License Audits (reactive): no technical licensing, terms regulated on paper Hybrid - combination of technical licensing and audits The challenge for every vendor is to find the [...]
Revenue leakage resulting from non-compliant behavior is a vendor's nightmare. However, in most cases this is not due to evil customers (licensees), but due to process intransparency: The vendor's licensing policy changed, while the customer is not aware/informed. The number of users/devices increased, but the licensing data has not been updated (deliberately or not). The [...]
One of the greatest obstacles for software vendors considering a professional licensing solutions is the migration from existing/legacy solutions. The introduction overhead of a new system might affect not only the software vendor himself, but also (and more importantly) the existing customer base. The biggest concern in most cases is having to provide new license [...]
Being responsible for our licensing, every time that a new, to be licensed feature was developed, I had to update the (master) license definition. In parallel, our engineers had to make sure that the software worked seamlessly with our licenses. While neither this process nor the subsequent generation of new licenses was a headache, existing [...]
As I explained in my first post, my first acquaintance with licensing came through my analysis requirements. Since we already had an in-house solution (which experienced colleagues of mine praised, considering it superior to others) and everything seemed to work fine, I naively believed that licensing would not considerably bother me. After all, product managers [...]
