SOFTWARE LICENSING

The Value of Sharing Entitlement Information with Customers

By Ashok Bindra, TMCnet Contributor

In a recent blog post on Flexera Software’s Entitlement & Compliance blog, vice president of product management Mathieu Baissac shed some light on the value of sharing entitlement information online with customers. However, before talking about the virtues of sharing information, the Flexera executive first defined the difference between an entitlement and a license.

By ISO 19770-2 definition, entitlement is license use rights or rights to a service as defined through agreements between a software licensee or user (recipient of service) and a software copyright holder or service provider. To that, Baissac added a recording of a license use of right or rights.

In practical terms, Baissac turned to an example to get the definition across. If a publisher has a special end-of-year sale of “buy 1000+, get 50 percent off,” and a customer purchases 2000, the customer then takes that 2,000 and gets a license key for a number of departmental servers. The entitlement is the record that says a customer has rights to 2000 of thing X. The licenses are the 100, 500, etc. license keys that are installed on various license departmental servers, explained Baissac.

In his experience, there is immense value for Producers to provide entitlement information to their customers online, easily accessible with downloadable reports, available 7x24.  

By providing entitlement information and making it available to customers and/or partners, consumers of this information can answer questions referring to planning a future license budget, a future maintenance budget, a training campaign for an upgrade or finding customers with expirations coming up.

Besides data mining advantages, there is one unspoken value. “It's much easier to hold a customer accountable to keeping compliant – if you (as a Producer) tell them what you think they have and make that available anytime they want,” wrote Baissac.

However, the Flexera executive could not think of a reason for not sharing entitlement information online.

When you fully understand how customers use and value your software, you may begin to realize the benefits of offering entitlements to different license models to meet the nuances of deployment requirements. This is especially true for software vendors and embedded device manufacturers that offer enterprise-level software that forms part of the backbone for the customer’s operational infrastructure. What you may find, is that these nuanced requirements may be reasonably common, and possibly represent revenue opportunities.

In another blog post, Flexera’s principal consultant Cris Wendt highlights the benefits of offering entitlements to different license models to meet the nuances of deployment requirements. According to Wendt, this is especially true for software vendors and embedded device makers that offer enterprise-level software that forms part of the backbone for the customer’s operational infrastructure. 

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