Software License Management Blog by X-Formation

Recently, our X-Formation team has had their own personal success implementing the X-Formation License Distribution Service software to manage license fulfillment needs.

With an ever-increasing customer base, we needed a more efficient and reliable means of allowing users to obtain and activate their X-Formation software licenses (License Statistics, License Distribution Service and, in the near future, LM-X). Our manual systems were becoming cumbersome and tedious, and the license activation tool was problematic when used on proxy servers. With no central database for actual license usage, too high a percentage of our customers were under-licensed or unlicensed, and we spent excessive time on billing.

We needed a solution that would allow users to fulfill their own licenses and easily activate them, which gave us the perfect opportunity to use our own License Distribution Service software.

License Distribution Service has made it possible for us to deliver automatic self-service license fulfillment using a web interface, including the important component of online license activation. By implementing the SOAP-based PHP web interface in our Support Portal, our customers now need only enter their 16-digit hostid, and at the click of a button, can download the license and start to use it within seconds.

On our end, to process and deliver purchase orders to our customers, we simply log into the administrative area of our Support Portal and select the product the customer purchased. License Distribution Service does the rest. It creates a new Order ID, picks the appropriate license template, generates a license using the correct license generator (LM-X, in our case), and makes the license ready for customer's self-service activation. All without any further intervention.

The service works in the same way for maintenance plan updates/upgrades, subscription renewals, and add-on purchases. All we need to do is change the settings in the Support Portal and click OK. Behind the scenes, License Distribution Service makes the needed changes to the license file and makes it ready for the customer to re-activate.

Using License Distribution Service, we can quickly and easily set limits on user count, define the maintenance time, and specify the number of vendors, all using a web interface that communicates with License Distribution Service directly using methods set within a binary WSDL file.

License Distribution Service has simplified and streamlined many functions for the X-Formation support team. Says Pawel Karwowski, an X-Formation developer, "The simplicity of license creation and SOAP-based web interface combined with the PHP-based distribution system we've implemented in our Support Portal do their job well."

For Konrad Marszalek, an X-Formation support engineer, License Distribution Service has made his job easier and freed up his time for tackling important support issues for X-Formation customers. "We no longer have any complaints from customers who previously had troubles with license activation, so I can concentrate on support issues directly related to improving our products," explains Konrad. "Best thing is, License Distribution Service saves me from all the tedious work of license administration."

Of course, when all is said and done, we're all most concerned with our ROI. In the first week after implementing digital licensing with License Distribution Service, we had upgrade sales of more than 10,000 USD in the first week, because customers who were previously under-licensed started to purchase the new licensing required to be compliant with the licensing terms. Previously, they simply didn't know about the fact that they should purchase additional licensing. Furthermore, it allowed us to perform automatic billing by extracting business intelligence from the service, which in turn lets us create automatic invoices. This replaces an entire employee, another significant return on the investment spent putting the service in place.

Not only did using License Distribution Service benefit us greatly in managing our own license fulfillment, but it gave us the experience of using the software in the same way as our customers do, increased our depth of understanding and our abilities to use our own technology, and as an end result, we gained knowledge we're able to use to make the software better.

With the latest release of License Distribution Service, we've added support for FLEXnet and custom license generators, easily accessible using the License Service Administrator user interface. This enhancement was done in response to several requests from large companies who are interested in supporting their existing legacy licensing technology while transitioning to the newer and easier license models that LM-X License Manager provides.

With License Distribution Service, customers can now continue to ship software using existing license generators while migrating. This ability to have one infrastructure for all licensing instead of maintaining several different systems carries with it significant cost savings. Furthermore, this implementation is on a per-product basis, allowing you to use a legacy licensing technology in the current version of your product and then upgrade to LM-X with a later version of your product.

As always, License Distribution Service is included free with LM-X License Manager for smaller companies (those managing up to 100 license orders), and if you're an existing LM-X customer, you can start taking advantage of the benefits of the latest release immediately.

It's very common for software providers to bind a license to a particular hostid. A request we've heard numerous times from LM-X customers is to be able to bind their licenses to more than one hardware item in order to make stronger bindings and be more resistant to unauthorized or abused usage.

However, a significant drawback to binding a license to multiple hostids is that if one of the hardware items is replaced or broken, you have to re-issue licenses, because they are no longer valid for the particular machine.

The latest version of LM-X offers a solution to these problems: hostid match rate. This new feature lets you specify the required percentage of a successful hostid match, from 0 to 100 percent, in individual license files.

For example, if you lock a license to 3 hardware items and 2 of them succeed, the actual percentage of matching hostids is 66.67%, which is rounded down to a match rate of 66. In this case, if the license specifies a match rate of 66 or lower, the license checkout will succeed, whereas a match rate of 67 or higher will cause the hostid check to fail and the license checkout will not succeed.

Since hostid match rate is implemented on a per-license basis, you can reward trusted customers with a more lenient match rate, while using a more strict match rate (e.g., 100%, which is the default) for less trusted customers.

As a followup to the announcement we made in a previous article, "Embedded web server coming soon," we're happy to let you know that our recent License Statistics v3.0 release includes this web server, as promised.

The benefits and new possibilities our latest release makes possible are not to be underestimated. The first immediate benefit for License Statistics is that the software is faster than ever before and is scalable to even higher usage tracking than earlier releases.

The reaction from customers thus far has been either positive comments or, for the most part, no comments at all. Since this is a more or less invisible component of our software, the fact that it's not noticeable to most users is actually a good thing. The old adage, "no news is good news" is true in this case.

Be assured that we aren't resting after accomplishing these latest advancements, but instead are hiring more engineers to let us continue the success and incorporate all the feedback that our customers give us. Thus, you can expect even more improvements in this area as we start using our new technologies in our other products.

To find out what else is new in License Statistics v3.0, see the related blog article, "License Statistics v3.0 released."