Entries by Henrik Goldman

I feel that time is flying so fast right now! It seems that each Sunday I go to sleep and then I wake up the following Friday afternoon asking where the time has gone.

Recently, I was out of the country for about 1½ months, spending my time keeping up with the ever-increasing amount of activity. I traveled to Calgary in Canada; spent time in the United States in Los Angeles, Denver, and other cities; and traveled to destinations within Europe. During my travels, I met with both existing and new clients. It was great to have such a wonderful opportunity to see the various industries and learn firsthand about the problems that our users have been facing. The clients I met with ranged from very small businesses to a Global 500 company, which aptly represents the companies we help support today. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to meet with everyone who was interested, but I'm sure it's not the last time I'll visit the US.

When I had time to reflect on my experiences and understand further the different issues discussed during our meetings, it's become clear to me that the industry needs improved solutions. Most of our clients expressed their interest in what our next product versions will contain, and I am pleased to say that good stuff is heading your way.

Now that fall is settling in, we're working even faster and harder to get the next versions of our products ready. This means that we've been making a lot of investments in our infrastructure, such as enhancing our testing equipment and preparing to get new services up and running.

More announcements will be coming later, but let me just say that we're in the progress of doing more than ever before to give you an even smoother experience working with us. This will include new customer-related enhancements, which we're eager to deploy when the time comes.

So, while I sometimes wonder where all the time goes, I always remember that our mission is to put the customer in the center, spending all our efforts on helping you to be successful with our products.

After doing your best to anticipate what your users want from your software product, the next step is to ask your users whether you got it right. If you did your job well, when you ask your users for feedback, you may get limited new ideas, because it does indeed meet their expectations and gets the job done. Such is the case for LM-X License Manager and License Distribution Service.

As our offerings and number of customers are increasing, we too need to keep track of our users, so we're now integrating LM-X and License Distribution Service as solutions to manage our own offerings.

As a colleague said recently, "... this is like eating your own dog food." While our users give us every indication that our "dog food" is high quality, in the process of using our software to solve our own license management needs, we will discover the exact problems that annoy users from time to time. With our initial use, we've already proposed a ton of new functionality that will both enhance ease of use and fix those minor annoyances.

The end result: what once was dog food becomes gourmet fare. Bon appetit!

We often talk with clients in the industry who want to distribute network licenses for their software, and ask us, "How do we offer the best flexibility to our users, while still making sure our software is secure against illegal use?" In the old days, that would have been a hard question to answer. Today, with new emerging technologies such as virtual machines, it's become much easier.

Let me explain: Many companies in the 1990's liked using dongles due to their flexibility and their ability to be moved from one machine to another. The downside of this was that they were expensive and cumbersome to deal with, because they could easily be broken or lost.

With the emergence of inexpensive networking equipment, the modern environment now consists of a larger infrastructure that lets users connect to the corporate network while still being able to disconnect and do things offline. When it comes to license models, this represents very well the reasoning behind both node-locked and floating licensing.

In early 2000, I personally swore that I would never need a laptop, because everything I ever needed to do could easily be done on a standalone machine. Guess what... I'm writing this message from a laptop today. People like me who are always on the run need flexibility. When it comes to software licenses, you want them to work for you, not against you. That's why license models such as floating and borrowed licenses have made a huge impact on how people buy and use commercial software today.

Another technological breakthrough that changes how we look at licensing is virtual machines, which offer the needed advancements on the server and back-end infrastructure. We see more and more interest in virtual environments, because this sparks the same progress in computing as the advent of the network did back in the 90's. Already, even smaller companies like X-Formation couldn't be performing the operations we do without virtual machines. One of our machines runs with 10 virtual machines concurrently to perform only some of our testing. Without tools like VMware, our hardware costs would be multiplied many times to perform the same operations.

The idea here is that software must adapt to the modern environment, which is also the reason we invented virtual machine licensing. Virtual machine licensing is disabled in LM-X by default; otherwise, users can easily duplicate their number of licenses in a matter of minutes by using virtual machines.

However, if you combine a virtual machine license with hostid locking for dongles, you get the best of both worlds. In addition to getting the floating and borrowed license capabilities that our customers typically request, you also get a solid hostid locking mechanism that doesn't depend on virtual hardware devices. Thus, copying of virtual machines becomes irrelevant, because you won't be able to start more than one instance of the software anyway.

In such a setup, a dongle connected to a server is easier to manage. Servers are typically isolated and seldom moved around, so risks of stolen or lost dongles are minimal compared with single-user licenses. In addition, costs for a single dongle are minimal compared with node-locked usage, which makes it possible to incorporate dongle usage into contracts when people are signing up for greater numbers of licenses.

If you would like to hear more about potential license models, contact us today, and we'll be happy to discuss your specific requirements.

Recently, we've had a trend brought to our attention. More than five customers called us independently within a single week with the same basic story: "We're just not satisfied with our current license management product anymore. Recent price increases have us looking for a licensing alternative...it's simply gotten too expensive."

Disliking the complexity that comes along with many license management products is another trend we've seen lately. As one customer said to us, "We don't have a whole department helping us to support this product. There are just too many problems with it."

Seems that people don't like overpriced, complicated software. What's more, they don't like paying for something they don't use.

Some companies don't seem to realize you need to be flexible and adapt to customers' needs. We often say that many of our competitors can do just about everything you could imagine...including licensing. Software licensing products have been around for a long time, and many of these products are considered large, bloated legacy software by today's standards. Unfortunately, you--the customer--have to deal with and pay for all the stuff you don't need.

Fortunately, for the dissatisfied users who've approached us, we've usually been able to reduce their expenses by 2 to 20 times. In the vast majority of cases, users could switch from their legacy license manager to LM-X with virtually no effort and with improved customer satisfaction.

In addition, along with our general goal to make our products easy to use, we help ensure our own customers have an easier time finding answers about our products. To this end, we now have a comprehensive knowledgebase that allows both you and your users to find answers quickly, when you need them.

Why make things more complicated than they have to be? Why not try LM-X today and see how you can cut down on your maintenance costs and make your life a little easier.

IJW is a (cool) technology that Microsoft invented with .NET. Essentially, IJW is the connection layer between managed and unmanaged code. IJW stands for "It Just Works." Personally I find the name IJW a fascinating thing; who wouldn't want to make software that just works, right?

Understanding what our customers are really looking for, we're making our own efforts at employing IJW technology. In practice, this means that we're trying to cut down on the number of problems and fuss you'd imagine come along with products that deal with software licensing. History has shown that this is a difficult thing, which we're reminded of nearly every day when people call us complaining about their legacy license manager not working properly with License Statistics.

For example, we recently talked with one customer who said he couldn't get his application to work with License Statistics. When we told him to make a simple change in his configuration file, he asked whether the software would pick up the change by itself. He was perceptibly surprised when we told him that the application would do everything for him and he needn't worry. This is IJW in action: another problem solved and another customer who can worry less.

An interesting side note to this story is that this particular improvement to the software was suggested as a part of our customer-driven development program.

As far as other IJW technology we're implementing, we're actively trying to cut down on the time you have to spend searching for information. A lot of articles have recently been added to our knowledgebase for your benefit. We've also been adding yet more checks to our quality control to ensure there are fewer problems and cut down on the time spent on bug tracking -- which leaves more time for developing better license management software for our customers.

Hey, IJW is a beautiful thing, isn't it?

We've now made it even easier for you to communicate with us!

Enabling you to get in touch with us easily and efficiently is very important for helping us to solve your licensing problems. For this reason, we've made it possible for you to call us using direct phone numbers in both the US and UK.

This allows American and British people to call us at local fees, instead of paying for international long distance calls.

This service covers only phone communication; we haven't changed our physical address. Calls are rerouted to Denmark, making it efficient for both parties.

We hope you'll welcome this improvement to our services that lets us better help you with your software licensing needs.

License Activation is a topic that many people have an aversion to, as it's typically seen as being overly complex and difficult to understand and use. Industry examples show time and again that there's a clear need for software license activation, but give no clear answers. One such example that comes to mind is Adobe's failed attempt about a year ago to enforce licensing. They had to give up these efforts, due to an unanticipated additional administrative burden on their customers.

Recently, we've deployed a license activation solution for our own customers. While we're obviously nowhere near the size of companies like Adobe, we still share many of the technical aspects and problems. For our customers, we prepared an article on how to activate your licenses for License Statistics.

One customer was skeptical about our solution, having experienced frustrations with license activation in the past. The skepticism was reasonable, given that the history of license activation isn't full of success stories. This particular customer was pleasantly surprised that our license activation didn't complicate his situation. In fact, our deployment has been virtually hassle free, working for the majority of our users with no problems whatsoever. While there is certainly some burden attached to license activation, it's much less than typically expected. Even non-technical people can follow our activation procedures easily and successfully.

So, what makes our activation so simple? Actually, while we've made license activation easy for our customers, it isn't so simple behind the scenes. On the back-end, this small application depends on three machines to function correctly: a PHP web server, ASP.NET web server, and a database.

The ASP.NET server is the main component that runs License Distribution Service and deals with key generation and communication with the activation applications. This process depends on a database, which in our case is located on another system (although this is not normally required unless you have a large load). Our PHP web server is another front end component that connects License Distribution Service to our web-based support system and allows users to see real-time information about their license status. This is particularly convenient when we help users over the phone, because they can see immediate updates to their licensing information.

As you can see, license activation doesn't have to be complicated for your users if you take the necessary steps to make it easy and convenient. License Distribution Service, as a programmable system, gives you the ability to customize license activation more easily for your own users needs.

To assist our customers who are evaluating License Statistics, we've uploaded a full collection of the HTML reports that License Statistics generates to our website:

License Statistics Full Reports Example

This set of pages shows the graphs and information that License Statistics provides. In addition to the basic reporting, some custom reports have also been generated. The custom reports are quite powerful, so the examples show only a fraction of what custom reporting can provide.

If you're interested in an evaluation, fill out our request form or contact us.

In the upcoming version of LM-X, we've extended Mac OS X support to include the x64 platform. The nice thing about OS X is that it offers what Apple calls "universal binaries." Essentially, this means that we can package multiple platforms into one file that will work on a number of platforms at the same time.
This is very convenient and makes it easy to provide the x64 support.

This is what our JNI (Java Native Interface) library looks like, with all the supported platforms:

sh-3.2# file liblmxjava.jnilib
liblmxjava.jnilib: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
liblmxjava.jnilib (for architecture i386): Mach-O bundle i386
liblmxjava.jnilib (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O bundle ppc
liblmxjava.jnilib (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit bundle x86_64

Isn't it amazing... we spent about 40% of our time this week explaining to our customers that their legacy licensing system is configured incorrectly, and therefore won't work with License Statistics until those issues are resolved. Unfortunately, we cannot fix these bugs despite our best intentions and efforts to help our users.

With our focus on being a responsible leading provider of software licensing products, many users have come to rely on our services so much, that we've found ourselves spending more and more time supporting products that aren't ours. To help both our users and our support team, we've been adding articles to our software licensing knowledgebase that advise users how to solve common problems with legacy systems that are used with License Statistics.

So what do we do with all this intelligence we've gathered on bad software? We use it to make our software better! Many people tell us that our software is simple to understand and use. Much of this ease of use comes from responding to and resolving the issues that our users come to us with.

The bottom line is that your feedback benefits both of us. Our newly introduced customer-driven development program is a big success, because it enables our users to help themselves, help each other, and help us to do our job better. After all, who is better at knowing what you need than you are?

We believe that your contributions make it possible to bridge the gap between existing legacy licensing systems and the more modern solutions that we provide.

Do you have a question or an idea for us? Contribute today and see how we can help you make your life easier.

I've decided to put some focus on IBM LUM, which we support through our License Statistics license usage monitoring software.

There are a handful license managers in today's market, including LM-X License Manager, IBM LUM and others. While all of these license managers work similarly and serve the same purpose, they certainly have not been created with the same goal. I won't make this a history lesson, but it's worth noting that IBM LUM has been around for a long time and is used mainly by CATIA today.

We've supported several license managers over the past few years, and I personally think that IBM LUM is a strong candidate for "Most Complex License Manager." It's designed to accomplish the same task as others, but far more users complain they have problems getting License Statistics to work with it. In some cases, we've resolved these problems, and in others our only choice was to leave the support for the application vendor.

Here is a small, unordered list of some of the problems we've seen with IBM LUM:

1. Although its reporting capabilities are written in English, some parts of the reports, such as date information, are output in the local language. So, if you're running a Chinese version of Windows, you'll get an English report with unicode date characters. Very illogical, and for no obvious purpose.

2. Setting up i4blt (the query utility) comes with about 100 "garbage" files and it's difficult to set up correctly. If you make a single mistake in this process, you'll get wrong error messages like "server not found." The setup for i4blt is misleading and tricky at best, and a complete failure at worst. Whatever happened to simplistic deployment?

3. The config files that IBM LUM offers are obscure and overly bloated with seemingly useless details. From time to time, customers even ask us to write their config files for them. Obviously, we don't do application-specific support, and wouldn't want to read the 300+ page manual on the topic. I'm sure it's a good night read, though.

4. Speaking of the manual for supporting IBM LUM being 300+ pages, that should be a sign that there are far too many options that can trip you up.

5. Sometimes i4blt takes 1 second to complete, yet for some high availability license clusters it takes up to 15 minutes. Why? No one knows. I guess it's a good reason for spending more on application support, since it seems to work at random in the first place. Furthermore, the speed depends greatly on whether you run the tools on AIX or Windows. Go figure!

6. The reporting is inconsistent. Sometimes it works for high availability licensing, and other times it doesn't.

7. Old, old, old! IBM LUM still runs on Java 1.3, which is now considered ancient, has no support for 64 bit, and lacks modern functionality.

When people come to us with their IBM LUM woes, we assure them that they're not the only ones. We have over 30 successful installations of License Statistics with IBM LUM, but virtually everyone has problems up-front with the system. How can this be? Obviously, it's alarming, but we learn from such experiences and turn the negative feedback into understanding how things should not be done. For us, this understanding gives us insight into improved functionality for LM-X License Manager.

I don't think any of the modern license managers are going to top the complexity of IBM LUM anytime soon. As they say at the Oscars..."We have a winner!"

Virtual machines, such as VMware and Virtual Server, are a controversial topic: they're great from a usage perspective, but troublesome from a licensing perspective.

Today's technical world is moving quickly, and powerful, efficient hardware has become so cheap that it doesn't make sense to stack up loads of energy-hungry equipment in data centers anymore. Companies both small and large are consolidating their servers to reduce physical hardware breakdowns and streamline operations.

On the software licensing side, this shift has caused a predicament for software vendors, including us. Can software vendors allow users to buy a single user license and then freely load it onto a virtual machine that allows multiple copies of the license to be in use? In most cases, this is considered a license violation that vendors must try to protect their licenses against.

In response to this need, the newest version of LM-X License Manager offers specific functionality that lets you detect and handle virtual machines. With LM-X License Manager's virtual machine licensing feature, you can specify when a user can and cannot use your license on a virtual machine.

This is a prominent, real-life problem that should be handled by any serious software licensing vendor. Perhaps surprisingly, LM-X is the first professional licensing vendor in the world to actively support this functionality, instead of silently allowing potential overuse.

LM-X License Manager is designed to be hassle-free and easy to deal with, putting you in charge of creating your own license policy. For example, a common way to deal with virtual machine licensing is to allow it only for large enterprises and other companies you know you can trust. It's entirely up to you to decide...you provide the policy, and we provide the tools to make it happen.

If you would like to see an LM-X License Manager demo with this new addition, please request an evaluation.

Recently, I got a phone call from a potential customer, who said they were interested in using LM-X License Manager to license their software product.

They had been using one of our competitor's license management products some years ago, but then began partnering with another company on licensing issues and no longer needed license management software. Later, they wanted to break free from the partner they'd been working with, so they approached their previous license management software company again. Being a small company with only a few developers, they were understandably discouraged about getting a quote in the magnitude of tens of thousands USD.

Listening to this company's needs, I saw that we would be completely capable of solving their technical requests. They didn't mind our initial purchase price either, which was several times lower than the competitor's.

However, they expected that our software would include unlimited support at no additional cost, arguing that large companies like Autodesk offer a licensing model where maintenance is virtually free and covered by an up-front fee. I attempted to explain that continued development and support is expensive, because it's resource demanding and requires active time as opposed to selling a fixed package. But the company was so against paying for maintenance, they decided to write their own license manager.

Since I don't know exactly how Autodesk's licensing model works, I can't go into those details. However, the conversation got me thinking about what we as X-Formation want to achieve. After a few weeks of thinking, I concluded that what we feel is more important to our customers than free support is quality support.

We want to offer our products at very competitive prices and with high quality support, and we work hard to accomplish this. The bottom line is that our products are sold at prices several times less than our higher-end competitor's products. At the same time, we optimize our support resources to takes care of our customers requests much faster than our competitors do.

On a daily basis, our average support response time is about 1-6 hours during normal business hours. This goes for both small and large customers, because we value all our customers.

Furthermore, bugs are usually identified within a few hours and typically solved within the same day if it's not a complicated problem. In some cases, we've acted so quickly that the customer reporting a problem didn't even have time to verify the solution until much later after receiving the solution.

Recently, we also introduced our issue tracking system, which allows our customers to participate directly in our development. Yet another step we've made to increase the satisfaction of our existing client base as well as welcome new users to the X-Formation family. Actually, our users are better called partners, because they are the key resource for allowing us to create better software.

We recognize that frustrated users can be particularly helpful in improving our services.
I do not see negative feedback as bad. Rather, it encourages us to improve our services and increase the value that we provide.

The feedback we've received has influenced us in introducing several offerings for our different markets. Here are a just a few of the offerings we did throughout 2007:

Discount for Samreport users
License management made affordable
LM-X License Manager for Free
Discounted Prices for License Statistics

To sum up, we prefer giving our customers real value over simply providing low-cost software that doesn't deliver the functionality and level of support that customers need to get their jobs done. During the upcoming year we will continue to strive towards delivering more value.

Throughout the past year, we've written a large number of blog articles on the subject of software license management. However, there have been few comments on these articles.

I think this lack of open discussion is likely due to the fact that license management is a pretty boring topic for most people. After all, who wants to waste their time thinking about a topic that seems made only to annoy users?

Sure, the subject of license management can seem boring. However, at the end of the day, it's all about ROI and improving your business. As a contributor to these common goals, the impact of good license management cannot be underestimated. Throughout the past year, we've had customers telling us stories like, "by the way, using License Statistics we identified savings of more than 200,000 USD within the last 2 months. I'm sure our software vendor won't be happy when we renew our licenses."

This is just one in a series of "boring" license management stories we've heard from our users.

Looking at the industry, we see that many competitors, including the market leaders, experience the same lack of public feedback on their sites that we experience on ours. However, despite a lack of public feedback, we certainly receive a great deal of feedback by email. We greatly appreciate this feedback, as it helps us to understand your problems and experiences.

Unlike many, we're actually quite enthusiastic about the topic of license management and will continue to publish information on the subject. We value every opportunity to listen to you and help make the topic of license management a little less boring. Do you have some topic that interests you? If so, be sure to let us know and we'll be happy to pick up the conversation.

On February 14, 2008, Macrovision announced that they are selling their Software Business Unit to an investment company that will take over its operations. The Software Business Unit includes FLEXlm/FLEXnet, a competitor with X-Formation's LM-X License Manager.

Although Macrovision advocates that this change is positive, some users will likely be apprehensive and unhappy with the uncertainty it presents.

During the past few years, we've helped mid-size to large corporations switch from FLEXlm/FLEXnet to LM-X License Manager. These companies' desire to find an alternative to Macrovision's license management solution is greatly due to their dissatisfaction with increasing costs and support falling short of their expectations.

To help companies who are ready for a change, we're now offering a transition discount of 10% off our normal pricing when switching from an existing Macrovision solution to LM-X License Manager. This discount will be available through 2008.

Get more details about this special offer.