Monday, November 2. 2009
Recently, we've made several performance optimizations to the LM-X License Server to accommodate increasing demands from our customers. With our latest improvements, the license server can now support more than 10,000 concurrent clients under Windows.
In the test we conducted, the client checked out a feature from the license server and kept the connection open for 1 hour. Furthermore, the CPU and memory usage is quite low. The CPU utilization is 0% on average, and memory usage is no more than 150 MB for 11,000 concurrent clients in our lab tests done with 9 machines.
These optimizations are already available in the latest release of LM-X License Manager, and we're looking forward to supporting our end-users with even greater improvements to LM-X in the future.
Monday, October 19. 2009
With Microsoft releasing Windows 7, we're committed to ensuring that our customers have a successful experience using both License Statistics and LM-X License Manager under this newest operating system.
We recently announced that LM-X was ready for Windows 7 (see LM-X supports Windows 7 RTM). Now, we've risen to the next level by certifying that our products as officially Windows 7 compatible.
As a leading provider of license management software, X-Formation is dedicated to supporting the latest platforms to provide a hassle-free experience for our customers.
Monday, October 12. 2009
FLEXlm, I mean FLEXnet, or rather FLEXNet now... made by Macrovision... oh, right, that would be Acresso... what, they aren't Acresso anymore? Wait a minute. Who makes that software, and what's it called again?
Without a doubt, FLEXnet, now FLEXNet and formerly known as FLEXlm, has made an impact on the industry of software licensing for over a decade. However, in recent years, the product has undergone a turbulent time. Initially, the software was manufactured by Globetrotter and then from Macrovision. Then, in April 2008, it was bought by the investor Thomas Bravo, forming the company Acresso. Now, less than 2 years later, the company has changed names yet again, and is now Flexera Software. It's hard to keep up with all these changes.
If I were a now-Flexera customer, I would naturally be concerned, as all these changes leave you unsettled and wondering what to expect next. While the software certainly still has a significant presence in the market, for many it's become a legacy product that has opened up opportunities for companies like ourselves to provide a better alternative.
Over the past few years, we've accomplished many successful transitions to LM-X License Manager, where the customer stories are the same every time:
1. As a smaller company we're a lot more flexible and dynamic, allowing us to adapt to individual needs much faster.
2. Our lower-cost pricing is more transparent and comprehensive for the customer.
3. LM-X License Manager offers exceptionally high quality that doesn't require weeks or months for issues to get fixed.
Our customers have discovered that LM-X offers them a more modern licensing solution, with a focus on end-user ease of use and a more streamlined, simplified implementation that doesn't require mulling over 700+ pages of manuals to accomplish simple tasks.
With our recent price changes, now is a great time to take a look at LM-X License Manager and get a fresh perspective on license management software.
Oh, and by the way, we don't plan on changing our name anytime soon.
Wednesday, September 23. 2009
For some vendors, a license model based on CPU cores can be the best method for effectively pricing your software.
Since this license model bases licensing on your customer's computing resource requirements, the more powerful machine the customer has, the higher the license price. For example, since a 4-CPU machine is double the speed of a 2-CPU machine, you can price a license for a 4-CPU machine at double the cost for licensing a 2-CPU machine.
This license model is particularly desirable for distributing high-tech computing, application virtualization, calculation, and other such software.
With LM-X v3.1, it's easy to implement such a licensing model. You just use the appropriate flags in the LM-X Checkout function to set the count to either the number of logical or physical CPUs. LM-X will then check the corresponding CPU count on the machine and checkout the suitable number of licenses if available.
LM-X users might be interested in learning the details on implementing licensing based on CPU cores by reading our How-to article, " Using CPU cores for floating licenses."
Friday, September 11. 2009
X-Formation is pleased to announce a new pricing structure for LM-X License Manager that makes protecting your software even more affordable. Large companies can save up to 40% when compared with the purchase price of FLEXlm/FLEXnet, and our Small Business Program helps start-ups to purchase LM-X License Manager at exceptionally low cost.
Lower cost doesn't mean lower quality. On the contrary, With features like token-based licensing; time-zone-based licensing; virtual machine licensing; automatic server discovery; redundant server support; grace and borrow licensing; license sharing; license queuing; and many more advanced licensing capabilities, LM-X meets or exceeds the technology FLEXlm/FLEXnet has to offer.
What's more, switching to LM-X from FLEXlm/FLEXnet is relatively simple, as the functionality is similar. Customers who've made the transition to LM-X have told us that the process was surprisingly easy with few to no problems.
By making the price structure for LM-X License Manager even more affordable, we're meeting the needs of today's companies by providing superior value and quality, in times when we're all striving to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
For more information, you can read our latest press release on the X-Formation website.
Monday, September 7. 2009
With more and more vendors using LM-X License Manager, the amount of software on the market that's protected by LM-X is rapidly increasing. Typically, LM-X is used by medium and large companies, who ship their LM-X protected software to a great number of their own software end-users.
With such extensive distribution and ever-growing presence in the marketplace, X-Formation products have now been deployed to over 10,000 users world-wide in practically every industry, as you can see on our website’s End-Users page.
In fact, we are even LM-X end-users ourselves: we use LM-X License Manager for our License Statistics product. This gives us a personal and invaluable perspective on what an end-user experiences with LM-X protected software.
The opinion of end-users contributes greatly to the improvements we make to LM-X. While we strive to provide the best in software security, we understand it’s crucial that end-users find the license manager easy to use and robust with the features they expect, such as grace and borrow licenses, automatic server discovery, and redundant server support.
We are always striving to deliver the very best quality to everyone who uses our products. By actively listening to our customers and implementing true customer-driven development through tools such as our issue tracking system, we ensure that we're in touch with all our users' needs.
Thursday, September 3. 2009
In order to help those who are just learning about or evaluating License Statistics, we've had a full collection of License Statistics HTML reports on our website. We've now replaced this set of examples with a live demo, giving you an even better idea of what License Statistics is capable of. To see the live demo, go to License Statistics Full Reports Example on our website.
This demo includes many examples of License Statistics standard current usage and monthly usage reports, as well as denied user and custom reports. Custom reports are flexible and powerful, so the demo shows just a small sample of the possibilities custom reporting can provide.
If you're interested in an evaluation, fill out our request form or contact us.
Tuesday, August 25. 2009
Recently, we introduced a new community resource on the X-Formation website: How-to Guides. Even with complete, comprehensive technical documentation, it's helpful to have less formal, step-by-step guides for solving particular problems.
X-Formation likes to share the knowledge we've gained during years of experience in the software licensing market. The How-to Guides describe how to accomplish specific tasks, such as implementing both common and sophisticated license models with LM-X License Manager. We also introduce use cases for License Statistics and License Distribution Service.
We're sure that visitors to the X-Formation website will find these guides very useful, especially since most of the articles have been created in response to actual needs our customers have reported. There are already over 20 guides in all, and with as many additional topics in the queue and new ideas coming to us nearly every day, the number of guides will increase rapidly.
If you have an idea for a How-to Guide that you would find helpful, be sure to let us know.
Tuesday, August 11. 2009
As a followup to our previous testing with Windows 7 RC, we've now invested time to ensure that LM-X works with the final release version of Windows 7, which was made available to partners last week.
We're happy to report that LM-X still works out of the box with no significant regressions. We've made a few minor tweaks to improve the experience working with LM-X under Windows 7, but these modifications are inconsequential.
With this testing completed successfully, we can reassure our customers and partners that the recently released LM-X v3.0 is already compatible with Windows 7, and will work for you out of the box whenever you choose to use the new Windows operating system.
Wednesday, July 29. 2009
The latest version of LM-X, v3.0, once again includes additional new features based on customer requests. In particular, we've responded to many customer requests by adding support for MinGW compiler as a native compile environment under Windows.
The benefits of using MinGW are clear. For Java customers and small business customers, MinGW support eliminates the need to invest in Visual Studio. Furthermore, MinGW support simplifies integration with Unix environments, because you're able to use the same GCC compiler and environment as you do for your Unix builds.
LM-X compiled with MinGW is available now, and can be accessed by both existing and new customers.
Thursday, July 23. 2009
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.
Thursday, July 16. 2009
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.
Friday, July 10. 2009
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.
Wednesday, July 1. 2009
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."
Wednesday, June 24. 2009
Our latest release of License Statistics, version 3.0, brings some exciting new features.
The main new feature of this release is an embedded web server that generates HTML pages of license usage data on the fly, giving you a true web-based experience. This new feature results in huge speed improvements in many larger environments, as it reduces statically cached pages by over 50%, compared with previous versions of the software. Also see our previous blog article on the embedded web server: " Embedded web server coming soon."
This release also makes available a new, separately purchased add-on application called License Saver. License Saver helps you actively reduce license costs by automatically releasing specified floating licenses on idle machines. Using License Saver, you can overcome those situations where licenses are unavailable because someone forgot to log off for the day or accidentally left an application open while gone for a meeting or out to lunch. You can find out more about License Saver on our website at License Statistics Add-ons.
License Statistics v3.0 also includes improvements for parsing and publishing denied checkout requests. These log files are now automatically included with other statistics information, available for viewing from the same HTML index page.
In addition, License Statistics now lets you make statistics anonymous, so user details are not shown in reports. This helps users in countries such as Germany, where laws dictate such requirements.
As always, we’re working hard to bring you improvements that help you experience even greater effectiveness and ease of use with our software. We continue to listen and act on the requests we hear from our user community to ensure our software helps you solve real business problems.
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