SOFTWARE LICENSING

Flexera Software: Preventing Software Piracy Leads to Increased Sales in China

By Rory Lidstone, TMCnet Contributing Writer

Software piracy still remains a huge threat to software providers, resulting in potentially millions in lost sales and licenses. For companies like Flexera Software, the creator of the world's leading installation development solution, InstallShield, preventing piracy becomes absolutely essential.

As such, the company tightened the tampering prevention in the 2011 and 2012 releases of InstallShield after finding cracked version of InstallShield 2010 on Russian and Chinese sites. Flexera estimates that around 1,000 units of the cracked InstallShield 2010 were downloaded, which may not seem like much, but translates into about $2 million.

While this does, at the very least, mean that demand is high for InstallShield, many developers don't want to pay for it, unfortunately. However, after applying FlexNet Publisher's Tamper Resistance to the product, shipments of InstallShield to China increased by 127 percent year-over-year in 2012. While Flexera didn't see a $2-million increase in revenue to recoup its piracy losses in 2011, the company expects to recoup 25 percent - 50 percent of that amount thanks to Tamper Resistance.

According to Maureen Polte, senior director of Product Management for InstallShield, neither InstallShield 2011 nor InstallShield 2012 has been cracked to date, which is a significant improvement over 2010, which had been cracked within days of its release.

In fact, on a recent blog post from Flexera, a number of comments from hacking sites are included, spanning from February 2011 to January 2013, which demonstrate just how effective the last two versions of InstallShield have been at preventing piracy. Comments include a hacker in February 2011 stating that the new protection InstallShield 2011 is "very different than the old one" and a commenter in October 2011 complaining that he doesn't expect InstallShield 2012 to be cracked, since no one was able to crack 2011.

Earlier in March, Flexera announced that Peter Prestele joined the company as senior vice president and general manager for the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region, bringing 20 years of experience with companies like Hewlett-Packard, Mercury Interactive and IBM (News - Alert) Europe.