<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>Software Piracy</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.softwarepiracy.in/feed" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.softwarepiracy.in</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:40:21 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2</generator>
	<language>en</language>
	<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
	<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
			<item>
		<title>Can you quickly and accurately determine your installed base?</title>
		<link>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/can-you-quickly-and-accurately-determine-your-installed-base</link>
		<comments>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/can-you-quickly-and-accurately-determine-your-installed-base#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:40:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Software Piracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[applicable]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dynamic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dynamic-nature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[initial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[installed-base]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[License]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[michael-costa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[only-the-system]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Relationships]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[transaction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.softwarepiracy.in/can-you-quickly-and-accurately-determine-your-installed-base</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ By Michael Costa That seems like a fairly easy and obvious question. Do you know who has which of your licensed software and/or hardware products, where they are located and to what each of your customers is entitled? With many companies responding to market demands for greater license flexibility and customer self-service, maintaining accurate installed base data is becoming a huge problem that must be addressed. Accurate installed base data allows you to maintain and grow your software and/or intelligent hardware business. Revenue from compliance true-ups, maintenance, support, upgrades, up-selling and cross-selling all depend on accurate installed base data. Attempting to audit license compliance based on erroneous installed base data can severely damage your relationships and reputation. Maintenance and support renewal quoting always starts with an accurate installed base view and asking customers to tell you their installed base undermines customer confidence. An otherwise focused up-selling or cross-selling campaign is considered "spam" to targeted customers that do not meet the applicable installed base profile. And, requiring your channel partners to report installed base lifecycle data in an accurate and timely manner is often more than they can achieve. Maintaining accurate installed base data is usually difficult because licenses tend to change during their lifecycle – sometimes frequently. Some of the common lifecycle stages include: initial sale, maintenance renewal, move, rehost, update, upgrade, downgrade, subscription extension, end-of-life and return. In addition, if you have an indirect sales channel, the initial sale can include two or more additional sub-stages. Inadequately integrating these transactions renders the installed base data for applicable licenses obsolete and useless. Workarounds require expensive, custom or manual integration with other transaction systems – and these workarounds are seldom scalable. One of the most common misconceptions I&#39;ve heard is that the "installed base" module in an ERP system is a viable system-of-record for storing all license lifecycle transactions. The problem is, as Mathieu Baissac pointed out , ERP systems were never architected to support the dynamic nature of today&#39;s flexible, self-served license transactions. ERP systems were designed to manage relatively static, physical assets – largely from an accounting perspective. They worked OK for software when license rights (i.e., entitlements) were relatively static – involving only initial sale, fixed period maintenance and end-of-life. But, as entitlements became more dynamic and hardware became field-expandable and networked, ERP systems became less and less viable. Many companies invested heavily to augment their EPR installed base modules to fill the functionality and performance gaps, but that has proven prohibitively expensive, slow and risky. At this point, ERP systems are only the system-of-record for the initial sale stage of the license lifecycle – primarily because they are often used to process orders. SalesForce.com is increasingly the primary or secondary order entry system for many companies because it is a natural, lower-cost environment for that purpose. An Entitlement Management System is increasingly recognized as the "always-accurate" installed base data solution. An entitlement management system converts orders into entitlements consisting of license rights that customers can then consume, transform and manipulate – within the terms of the purchased license rights. Those rights can include all of the license lifecycle stages mentioned above and many others – overdraft, peak usage, draw-downs and term licenses. License rights are not only applicable to software. Many intelligent hardware products are also being developed with flexible use rights metrics like storage capacity, router channels, networking bandwidth, medical diagnostic tests and even surgical procedures. Flexera Software&#39;s FlexNet Operations solution is an example of a mainstream entitlement management system that is specifically designed to manage the dynamic nature of current and future software and intelligent hardware lifecycles. It integrates with other on-premises, on-demand and mixed-environments like Oracle, SAP, Saleforce.com and many others using standard, configurable interfaces. Also, its tight integration with electronic software download, in-product license management and in-product messaging functionality to provide commercial, out-of-the-box best practices. ]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/can-you-quickly-and-accurately-determine-your-installed-base/feed</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Resolving SaaS Usage and Billing Disputes: Case Study and Best Practices</title>
		<link>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/resolving-saas-usage-and-billing-disputes-case-study-and-best-practices</link>
		<comments>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/resolving-saas-usage-and-billing-disputes-case-study-and-best-practices#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:37:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Software Piracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[customers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[figure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[planting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Product]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Publisher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[saas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software updates]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software-piracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[summer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[usage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[usage-reporting]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.softwarepiracy.in/resolving-saas-usage-and-billing-disputes-case-study-and-best-practices</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ By Bashyam Anant As a SaaS provider, on occasion, we run into situations where our customers question their usage and bill related to our SaaS offerings. One of the SaaS products I manage helps software publishers and intelligent device manufacturers electronically deliver software updates automatically to end user machines . Our customers are able to lower support calls and costs as a result and also gain valuable insights about their installed base. Pricing for this product is based on the number of distinct end user machines ("endpoints" for short) that receive software update notifications from the software publisher during a given subscription term; one year, in most cases. Recently, one of our customers felt that they were overpaying for the service because they did not believe that the number of endpoints reported by our product was accurate. The customer felt they only had 20,000 endpoints whereas our system was reporting 30,000 endpoints which had resulted in a significantly higher bill than what they were expecting. (Note: their actual data is not being used but this illustrates the problem the customer was facing). While such discrepancies are very rare, it can happen. To resolve such situations, we have developed the following best practices. Best Practice 1: Easily-understood Usage Metric Definition of usage metrics should ideally be self-evident to customers. While the notion of endpoints for our product is relatively clear to most of our customers, it still stumps a few. As a result, we take pains to explain it in terms that the customer can relate to. For example, if the publisher&#39;s software runs on a server machine, the number of endpoints correlates to the number of servers on which the software in installed. Nonetheless, a few such publishers tell us that they sold far fewer copies of their software during a year compared to what our product was telling them. The explanation could be as simple as customers deploying the software on multiple servers to enable development, test and production environments to something more serious such as software piracy. Best Practice 2: Self-service Usage Reporting It is important to avoid surprises at the time of invoicing. As a result, our product features a simple dial that shows the current consumption against purchased quota of endpoints each time our customer logs into the system. Should customers feel things are not aligned with their usage pattern, they can flag it right away to our support organization. It&#39;s not only important to provide customers with self-service but to also be completely transparent at all times. Best Practice 3: Capture Detailed Reporting Data While customers may never ask for it, we have found it a worthwhile practice to capture and store detailed usage information for each customer. For example, our system captures details such as daily endpoint count, how long a given endpoint was active, the most recent date when a given endpoint called home and so on. An example of such a detailed report is below. This figure shows the number of distinct endpoints that were active for less than 30 days, bucketed by the final month in which the endpoint was active, for the customer mentioned in this article (Note: numbers have been purged to protect privacy). In simple terms, such endpoints represent software that was used for 30 days or less. Figure 1: Endpoints active for less than 30 days by final month of use Such a trend has no particular relevance to us but it made complete sense to the customer, and helped them correlate software usage with ebbs and flows in their business, as we point out below. Best practice 4: Understand the Customer&#39;s Story More than anything else, we have found it useful to engage customers in a discussion of what might explain their usage trends based on the detailed report we provide them. This customer, as it turns out, is a leading manufacturer of farm equipment. Like auto and engine manufacturers, they provide software that helps dealers and repair shops diagnose problems with their engines and equipment. Our software]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/resolving-saas-usage-and-billing-disputes-case-study-and-best-practices/feed</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Webinar: 2011 Key Trends in Software Licensing and Pricing &amp; 2012 Predictions</title>
		<link>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/webinar-2011-key-trends-in-software-licensing-and-pricing-2012-predictions</link>
		<comments>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/webinar-2011-key-trends-in-software-licensing-and-pricing-2012-predictions#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:37:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Software Piracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[effectiveness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlements]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[including-areas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[konary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[license models]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pricing-survey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software licensing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[survey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the-importance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thursday]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trends]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.softwarepiracy.in/webinar-2011-key-trends-in-software-licensing-and-pricing-2012-predictions</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ By Ann Reist The 2011 Key Trends in Software Licensing and Pricing Survey, prepared jointly by Flexera Software and]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/webinar-2011-key-trends-in-software-licensing-and-pricing-2012-predictions/feed</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Maintenance Deserves the Same Respect as Your Software License</title>
		<link>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/maintenance-deserves-the-same-respect-as-your-software-license</link>
		<comments>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/maintenance-deserves-the-same-respect-as-your-software-license#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:36:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Software Piracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Analysis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[customer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[customers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entire-customer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Importance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[license models]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reflect-the-new]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software compliance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software licensing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software updates]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.softwarepiracy.in/maintenance-deserves-the-same-respect-as-your-software-license</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ By Cris Wendt and Anna Connell IDC conducted a survey a few years ago that illustrated the importance of software maintenance to the overall revenue stream of an enterprise software company (generally offering a perpetual software license model). The result of the analysis was a simple, compelling graph. One line was the license revenue growing at an annual compounded rate of 7% (healthy, but not spectacular), and the other line showed the growth of maintenance revenue, priced at 20% (annually) of the associated perpetual license with an 85% renewal rate. It showed that within 10 years, the maintenance revenue was a greater portion of overall revenue than license revenue (and continues to grow). This illustrates the power of maintenance revenue over an ever-increasing software installed base. However, in the spirit of a marketing perception audit, if maintenance were a person, it would be Rodney Dangerfield, and would be quipping, "Hey, I get no respect". While software companies generate substantial amounts of money from maintenance, maintenance is often treated as an appendage to the primary software products, with a surprising inattention to optimization of the offering. Here are signs that you may be neglecting your maintenance business and leaving millions of dollars of (mostly bottom line) revenue off of the table: Lack of a maintenance offering. Sometimes software companies seem overwhelmed or new to software and declare that they "provide updates and bug fixes for free for as long as the customer owns the product. Maybe someday, we&#39;ll have an offering". Maintenance is not treated like a product, where it is assigned a product manager, whose responsibility is define the product, price it, and communicate its salient features to customers and channel partners. Maintenance renewals are not handled by a separate and dedicated team whose role is to generate high renewals rates and protect/grow the existing maintenance revenue stream. Without this level of focus, maintenance revenue is frequently cannibalized in preference of new license revenue. The maintenance offering is often ill-defined other than "phone support and updates". Little consideration is given to what is included in an "update" and what might the value be to the customer. Are there boundaries to what functionality defines an "update" you receive on maintenance as opposed to an option that is paid as an "upgrade"? Software companies often have poor discipline accurately keeping accurate records of their customers – either by company name or by key contacts at their customers. This means that the maintenance renewal process cannot be effectively performed, if it can be performed at all. The problem becomes worse if sales are made through an indirect sales channel. Keeping accurate customer and sales records allows companies to track maintenance revenue and renewal rates which can gauge the health of their business long term. Pricing for maintenance is very ad-hoc, over-simplified, and pays little attention to the product lifecycle. Maintenance may have 1 or 2 price points that reflect an annual price that is a simple percentage of the purchase price of the original software license. Little value is given to the fact some products may provide tremendous value with their updates and may reflect a different price than maintenance on another product. Also, phone support is rarely separated from software updates (although often for good reason). Maintenance and renewal are typically overlooked when an event occurs on the product associated with the maintenance. A price change to the list license price of the product has the same result to maintenance and must be explained at renewal. When products are re-packaged and re-bundled, entire customer configurations often have to be adjusted to reflect the new packaging and pricing, leading to many manual steps to align current product offerings with what the customer originally purchased. While many of the problems above are related to " entitlement management " business processes and systems where Flexera Software can help you, a good first step is to honestly evaluate your maintenance business and to make it a priority with good leadership. ]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/maintenance-deserves-the-same-respect-as-your-software-license/feed</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Characteristics of a Successful Entitlement Management Program</title>
		<link>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/characteristics-of-a-successful-entitlement-management-program</link>
		<comments>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/characteristics-of-a-successful-entitlement-management-program#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 24 Dec 2011 18:36:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Software Piracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[characteristic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Module]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Operational]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[operations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software licensing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[successful]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the-business]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.softwarepiracy.in/characteristics-of-a-successful-entitlement-management-program</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ By Michael Smith Last time I outlined the Characteristics of a Successful Software Licensing Program .]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.softwarepiracy.in/characteristics-of-a-successful-entitlement-management-program/feed</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

