Software License Management Blog by X-Formation

I decided today to look at one of our competitors and the way they distribute their software. Without naming names, lets just say they're the largest company in the industry, which tells you that enterprises are their primary customers. However, something that caught my attention was their overly complicated way of distributing software.

Just to let everyone know the facts: LM-X, just like competing products, is being shipped on about 20 platforms. This results in a minimum of 20 installation packages, which takes quite a bit of time to produce. With products like LM-X, frequent updates are required, as platforms and compilers often change together with natural product evolution.

Today, we're able to complete a distribution of LM-X in less than half a day. Conversely, if you look at our largest competitor, you'll see they need 2 to 3 months to accomplish the same task.

What makes their distribution process take such a long time? First of all, their development is split up into tiers, with Windows and Linux (among other platforms) on tier 1, and less popular OS's like HP-UX on tier 2. The motivation behind this is naturally to complete all testing to ensure product quality.

But guess what? With our latest release of LM-X v3.5, we've had two bug reports and neither of them were critical. We don't believe that this is rocket science, despite having many binaries. In our company, we don't believe in splitting up development into tiers. However, if you want to convince people it's really "enterprise" to make justifications for "enterprise costs," then apparently this is one way to do it.

Furthermore, their IPv6 executables are split into different packages. This results in even more executables and even more "enterprise" difficulties. Welcome to programming anno 1990! With LM-X, we don't believe in making life harder than it should be. Everything works out of the box, including IPv6, which we've been supporting since 2006 without any effort.

If you're interested, we would be happy to tell you more about LM-X, the "enterprise simplified solution" without the enterprise costs.

It's been almost a month since the release of LM-X v3.5, where we tackled over 70 issues and made stability, reliability, and ease of use improvements. Now, we're back on track already, working on the next version. The focus for the coming release has been on further simplifying the API in order to provide even easier usage of the software. Furthermore, LM-X has become slimmer, which all in all means less maintenance and thus fewer worries for you and your end-users. There are also a number of features that are in line to be implemented. More information on this will be announced shortly.

Customers are already saying that with the latest releases, LM-X has become an "enterprise class" licensing system, but without the "enterprise costs." As one of our customers put it, "LM-X is the new, modern licensing system with all the desired features." So, if you are looking for a solution that won't cost an arm and a leg, we recommend downloading a free evaluation of LM-X and finding out why our customers are happy they made the switch. There's nothing better than a product that provides strong security, robust functionality, flexibility (not only in features but in price as well), and still has a focus on simplicity.