Tag: Software Monetization

Software Licensing Compliance & the ISO 19770-2 Standards

Software publishers have many ways to license and price their product – for example they can change the underlying revenue model by throttling between a perpetual license and time-based license, as well as offer different metrics to apply product pricing, such as named user, instance, number of managed devices, number of CPU’s etc. The duration and metric can be combined to offer pay-per-use or usage-based models. Various combinations of du…

February 3, 2011 Cris Wendt

Making the Subscription Software Licensing Model Work for You

Subscription license models are still a hot topic in the software industry, especially with their more widespread use with SaaS software.  The subscription license model typically involves providing the combination of software licensing (or “right to use” the software) along with all electronic software delivery and updates during a period of time, typically on an annual basis.  The benefit to the software publisher is the promise of a strong ann…

September 9, 2010 Cris Wendt

Software Licensing in Virtual Machine Environments

You may be trying to apply your existing software licensing and support models to the world of machine virtualization. Sometimes this is possible; sometimes those existing models are at odds with this new world. Here are some best practices for deploying a licensed application in a virtual machine environment which allows the greatest flexibility to your customers without creating vulnerability for your revenue stream: Best Practice #1 – A licen…

September 1, 2010 David Znidarsic

Beware: “All-You-Can-Eat” Software Licensing Can Give You Indigestion!

Whether you call them “enterprise-wide”, “site license”, “all-you-can-eat”, or “strategic”, all involve unlimited software license use in one way or another. If you are involved in these unlimited software licensing deals, no matter what they are called, you may be leaving a lot of money on the table unnecessarily and as a result, suffer from chronic indigestion. Of course, it is always better to do…

August 30, 2010 Revenera

SaaS is More Than a Software License Model

Many, if not most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings are typically offered using a named-user license metric and a subscription license model. Salesforce.com is the most popular example of this approach. But SaaS is really much more than a license model because: Offering your software in a SaaS model usually provides faster time-to-benefit, especially for enterprise software as configuration costs can be reduced through more standardized wor…

July 26, 2010 Cris Wendt

Software Licensing – Pricing the Concurrent License

The most predominant software licensing metrics used today for most enterprise software are either a named-user or machine-locked license. With the named user license metric, fees are applied typically by the name and role of the user accessing a set of software functions. This is often used with enterprise CRM or ERP software. With the machine-locked license, fees are applied based upon usage on a particular machine. These metrics are typically …

July 20, 2010 Cris Wendt

Governance for Effective Software Licensing

As an extension to last week’s topic of software license policies, is the topic of licensing governance. “Licensing Governance” is the effective management alignment of all licensing (and perhaps pricing) activities across and ISV’s or device manufacturer’s organization structure. Software licensing solutions have a significant cross functional impact to any organization. What we see is that the deployment of effecti…

April 29, 2010 Cris Wendt

Software Licensing – What are the Best License Metrics for a Virtual Machine World?

One of the most important decisions that a software product manager will have to make is which software licensing metric to choose when developing a software licensing model. To help understand which metrics are best for your software in light of virtualization, it’s good to provide a little background on license metrics, the value of virtualization, and the software stack. What is a License Metric and Why It’s Important The license metric is the…

March 31, 2010 Cris Wendt

Floating Software Licensing 2.0 – Virtual Machines & Cloud Computing

Software licensing models evolved in the 1990’s with the emergence of the floating license model, a model still in wide scale use today, largely in technical software markets.  At the time, the floating license model was an evolution of machine-locked software that was prevailing on standalone or lightly-networked personal computers.  Interestingly, the floating license model is taking its next evolution, with virtual machines and Cloud Computing…

March 23, 2010 Cris Wendt