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LicensingLive San Jose - Agenda

IDC Amy Konary, Research Director, Software Pricing, Licensing and Delivery The Impact of the Economic Meltdown on Software Pricing and Licensing

The economic crisis has left both software vendors and software clients reeling, with the immediate fallout evident in decreasing earnings and the promise of longer term impacts that could change the face of the software industry. The initial response has been visceral in both the customer and vendor communities, with customers looking to take advantage of the situation to renegotiate or get out of existing contracts, and vendors looking to exercise price increases that they've held off on in years past.

Beyond the initial turmoil, this crisis presents an opportunity to finally address pricing and licensing issues that have been plaguing the industry in the last several years. For customers, this means getting the most out of their existing relationships with vendors, and considering licensing alternatives that tap operating budgets and align more closely with use. For vendors, this means retrenching, and fixing operational and administrative issues that have made them less capable of adapting their pricing and licensing to new market realities. The future result should be more simplicity, automation, and flexibility in software licensing.

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Brocade Warren Jones, Business Architect-Software Products Software Licensing and Fulfillment in a Hardware Company

Leading a corporate initiative to transition all software products to a single, centralized licensing and fulfillment process must deal with many challenges, including cross-functional alignment of systems and processes. However, the most significant may be related to the culture of a hardware-centric organization.

As Brocade continues the transition to a centralized licensing and fulfillment strategy, I will review current progress & challenges along two lines of action: 1) migration of products to a single, third party licensing system and 2) roll out of the Software Portal as the self-service delivery method for all software related tools.

Complicating the process is the recent acquisition of another significant company that historically hasn’t embraced software licensing for features on their products. Business opportunities gated by integration of the new licensing API´s drive a fast track transition process.

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Kodak Graphic Communications Canada Saeed Hessami, Product Engineering, Operations Manager, Unified Workflow Software License Entitlement and Global Distribution

How do you deal with software licensing, entitlement and distribution when you have more than 30 products, over five thousand licensing options, 200 thousand licenses, five licensing technologies and over 50 thousand installations worldwide?

The presentation overviews the magnitude of the problem and the cost to an organization of not having a centralized management system that ties directly to its ERP system, the unique opportunities for improvements by having a centralized system, and the obstacles - like budget, resources, technologies, securities, and holistic approach - to realizing these fully.

The final solution and decision making path are discussed, as well as the additional benefits the solution will bring to both the organization and its customers.

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Vicon Motion Systems, Ltd. Warren Lester, Hardware Product Manager Sales and Licensing – efficiency with Sentinel and CRM integration

This session explores some of the challenges and solutions faced by OMG / Vicon when it came to integrating their software licensing system with their CRM system. An implementation of a "real time" integration between Salesforce.com and Safenet RMS is discussed in detail. Areas covered include the storage, integration and exposure of customer and licensing information. The efficiencies gained across sales and support departments are covered with emphasis on enabling departments and individuals to focus on their core responsibilities; selling product and supporting customers. Also covered are the ways in which automation streamlines the process of license distribution, minimises data entry errors and allows for management reporting based on licensing information which helps to drive revenue generation.

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Uniloc James Brentano, Chief Technology Officer What Enterprise Software Companies Can Learn About Licensing From Game Publishers

The lessons that games publishers have learned from working with mass market, retail consumer, high volume game titles can provide guidance to enterprise software companies on developing best practices for effectively licensing their products.

Scale, try and buy conversion, usability, security, and usage reporting are all discussed in this session. Case studies from large publishers in top tier games and the casual gaming category will also be covered.

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SAi Ran Rosin, Vice President of Product Management Moving From a Hardware Key to a Softkey-based Protection Model: Why & How We Did It

SAi tested and implemented several software security methods in order to determine which method best fits their business model. In this session, Ran will review the history of and reasons for selecting software security tools and the way in which they implemented them to address their needs.

 The following topics will be addressed:

• Implementing a security system that supports more than one thousand variations of a single product
• Was it cost effective to use a hard key when shipping roughly 35,000 products a year?
• What were the resources needed to build an in-house soft key protection system?
• Pro and Cons of the soft key system - was it worth the effort?
• The reasoning behind the decision that lead to the implementation of the Sentinel RMS  

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SafeNet, Inc. Chris Holland, VP Software Rights Management Licensing Strategies and Technologies in Global and Technically Evolving Markets

As the worldwide economic situation continues to evolve, software vendors must remain creative in order to maintain profitability. The battle will be won by the companies that find ways to maximize their revenue and continue to adapt to changing customers' needs. Maximizing revenue requires an understanding of the new paradigms introduced by SaaS and virtualization. Sophisticated software licensing and management systems offer one way to tap into market intelligence, gaining valuable visibility into customer usage patterns. In this presentation, Chris Holland VP Rights of SafeNet's Rights Management explores these and other technical issues faced by today's ISVs, with valuable steps that ISVs can take to maintain their strong market position.

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