SOFTWARE LICENSING

What can a COTS Software Licensing System do that ERP Doesn't?

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Alex Trebek watch out: Flexera Software’s Chris Wendt claims he has found a way to beat Jeopardy, especially when his software licensing business is at stake.

“When I need answers, I found that I only need to ask the right question,” Wendt stated in a recent blog post. What can a COTS software licensing and entitlement management system do (provide) for me that an ERP or a homegrown system can't provide?"

You mean other than determining channel velocity, measuring the effectiveness of new upgrade campaigns or establishing support business readiness parameters for support? I’ll take “Software entitlement management systems” for $1,000, Alex.

Such systems are part of protecting your organization's IP, as Wendt notes, “generating licenses, and providing the customers with a nice self-serve portal to manage licensing and compliance.”

As Wendt says, such a system can also provide you with valuable information to tune your business, since an entitlement management system is often integrated with other systems such as CRM, ERP, and LDAP “to perform the operations backbone for all business processes.”

Wendt has found a few answers to that question of what good a COTS software licensing and entitlement management system can do that ERP or home-built systems can’t, to wit:

-       Determine channel velocity, or, sales effectiveness through a channel. In other words, determine “the elapsed time from when an order is shipped to a channel partner, to when it is eventually activated by the customer.”

-       Measure the effectiveness of new upgrade campaigns. It does this by measuring the time it takes for customers to activate new versions of products from the time the release is made available.

-       Establish support business readiness parameters for support. This requires knowing the historical time from shipment to activation, to determine when you may receive the bulk of support calls for the new release.

And how about this one: Find where piracy may be occurring. Check the standard reports to determine which licenses are activated multiple times, or attempted to be activated multiple times.

As Wendt says, if you need answers, just ask the right questions.