The Myths of Pay-Per-Use Software Licensing & Pricing Models

A lot is being written about the eminent arrival of pay-per-use license models and how it will change the software licensing and pricing landscape. In fact, a lot has been written about the arrival pay-per-use models since the 1990’s. Nothing could be closer to the truth, yet farther away from the truth. Pay-per-use provides an intriguing and common value proposition to provide flexibility – pay for only what you use: eliminate the large up-front…

January 27, 2010 Cris Wendt

The A, B, C’s of Software License Compliance and Enforcement

Sometimes the topics of software license compliance and enforcement seem twisted, very much like one of those M.C Escher drawings popular in the 70’s and 80’s that show complex physical objects connected in impossible ways though the optical illusions created by his drawings. To this end, I thought a few blogs on the subjects of enforcement and compliance would be useful and interesting topics. Let’s start with some basic definitions: software li…

October 28, 2009 Cris Wendt

Improve Product Lifecycle Management Processes to Reduce SKU Count

One of the behaviors that we see with many software companies and high-tech manufacturers is SKU proliferation. When SKU counts are in the thousands or tens of thousands of items, the task of pruning the product line can become increasingly difficult.  This, in turn, exacerbates the SKU problem as something for someone else to solve.   In addition to the problems mentioned in the previous blog post, the proliferation of product data also can unde…

September 3, 2009 Cris Wendt

Flexible License Models – Which One is Right For You?

In the previous blogs, we discussed subscription based software licensing which combines the right-to-use along with access to software updates for typically a yearly fee. This week’s blog looks at a few examples of Usage Based Models. All of the commonly usage-based license models will have five important elements that are often “throttled” to achieve different business results: The breadth of software access (some or all products) The term (or…

July 22, 2009 Revenera