Entries by Henrik Goldman

With only a few days left before the new year, I'd like to say a few words about how this past year went.

First of all, I'm proud of what we've achieved at X-Formation. This year has been very exciting.

To start with the numbers, our user base has grown by an incredible 500%. The way I see it, this means we have 5 times as many development partners helping us to improve our products. I don't want to call our users customers; we want our users to be partners, working with us as part of our community.

To help you, our valued partners, play an active role in X-Formation, we've recently introduced our issue tracker system. This system helps us capture your input and enables us to make our software even better. Reports of software glitches or ideas for how our software can best meet your needs are always welcome.

The issue tracker also makes the support process even faster, allowing you to follow the real-time status on issues that interest you. In the few week’s time that this system has been available, I already see it as a success, allowing us to work even more closely with you.

As we've said many times, X-Formation is not just about software products. It's about solving needs. This is why we've been taking a number of steps to improve support, and I'm pleased to say that emails are normally answered within 6 hours and most issues are handled in a very short time as well.

Our increase in user base has also allowed us to create better software. This year, we've had 9 major and 4 minor releases, for a total of 13 releases. Even large companies can't match that speed. Furthermore, we are investing more in quality assurance to make the release process go even more smoothly.

In addition, we've published two entirely new products this year: License Distribution Service, which allows large-scale license fulfillment and activation; and an addition to License Statistics that lets you monitor standalone applications.

These new products help to satisfy requests from our existing users, to better help them solve their needs. Furthermore, it has allowed us to advance our products to a higher level and bring you a complete end-to-end solution. I anticipate that the upcoming year will also have an exciting entry, as we already have many different initiatives in the pipeline.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank all our users for their support during 2007. It certainly has been hectic at times, but that’s a good thing. We also want to welcome several of the new partners we've started to work with this year; both resellers and development partners – customers, that is – as well as business partners. We hope that you will continue your valuable contributions in the new year, letting us serve you even better. As we bring in 2008, I hope we will be able to help you even more effectively, and as always, we welcome your feedback to let us do so.

I and rest of X-Formation wish you a prosperous and happy new year!

Our latest version of LM-X License Manager has a new feature called transparent switch over.

As an end-user, it's frustrating when a license server goes down and you have to save your work and restart. No more! Using transparent switch over, LM-X License Manager protected applications can automatically move all license usage to a different license server, so users can continue their work without having to restart their application.

Transparent switch over makes applications using LM-X License Manager even more failsafe, allowing users to work more efficiently without being hindered by licensing requests.

It's important to us to have close contact with our customers. After all, we want to do our best to keep our customers satisfied and improve our services.

As part of this ongoing effort, we've introduced a new system for issue tracking, which you can find at http://issues.x-formation.com.

We encourage our customers and partners to use our issue tracking system to report bugs and request enhancements and new features. By using the issue tracking system, you can actively participate in our development process, to ensure that your good ideas are heard.

As always, we welcome feedback and value new ideas that help us to help you get the most out of your X-Formation software.

Log into the issue tracking system today and start participating in making X-Formation products the best they can be!

In today’s world, all software -- be it operating systems, business applications, or any other product -- must meet user needs and expectations. This is a fundamental requirement that software companies cannot ignore, and the software license management industry is no exception.

Earlier this year, we saw that Adobe License Manager had to be taken off the market within 6 months of its release. One interesting note about this story is that the licensing software was supplied by one of our competitors who is a leader in the market. Even so, the user reactions were so negative that Adobe had to withdraw its software.

Without a doubt, this situation likely caused some loss of customer goodwill in addition to the technical costs for personnel and software involved. My personal view on all of this is that the so-called “market leaders” have to some degree lost touch with their users. What is the benefit of making the most complex licensing software if it’s too difficult to use?

The great majority of end-users of software such as Adobe literally don’t care about licensing. They care about the software that Adobe sells them, not some 3rd party component that’s only making their life difficult. If you have a question on the subject of licensing, several of our competitors have 300-page manuals in which you can try to hunt down the answer. How much free time do you have for such a read?

The importance of focusing on simplicity seems obvious. Software should unobtrusively assist users, not make their lives more painful. Users don't want exhaustive 300-page manuals. They want simple, direct information that helps them get their job done as quickly and easily as possible. For example, you can install one of our products, License Statistics, in about 10 minutes with the help of our 2-page License Statistics Quick Start guide.

For our other product, LM-X License Manager, it's even more important to make use simple, because our customers’ end users couldn't care less about licensing -- just like Adobe's customers. For this reason, we've made LM-X License Manager’s configuration simple, specific and direct, to minimize the chances of misconfiguration.

Also, while it's great that some of LM-X License Manager’s competitors include so many features that they can do everything including licensing, this excess is not in the users’ best interest. Recognizing what end users really want and need, we have time-saving, helpful features that simplify the end user’s experience, such as automatic server discovery, high-availability licensing, and license blacklisting that handles license revokes. At the same time, we don't include a ton of features that only 2% of users would benefit from. Why would we? After all, we saw where this thinking got Adobe and several other companies.

All in all, the importance of simple license management cannot be underestimated. At the end of the day, everyone just wants to do their job and have software products perform as they should: working without a hassle!

Recently, we've been through the process of ensuring our software is compatible with the leading software industry standards.

After completing the compatibility process, we're now happy to announce that our software products, LM-X and License Statistics, meet the requirements for "Works with Windows Vista," Linux, "Solaris Ready," and "Mac OSX Universal."



Our work will pay off for you -- the user. We've been busy improving our software to acheive the greatest level of compatibility and ensure that future versions will work even more smoothly on the newest computing platforms.

Are you new to licensing? Feel free to drop us an email with your comments and let us provide you with an evaluation of our products.

Working with some of our Fortune 500 and Global 500 clients, such as Electronic Data Systems Corporation, we've had the opportunity to make significant enhancements to License Statistics’ IBM LUM support. The latest version of License Statistics now lets you obtain denied user statistics from IBM LUM as CSV data and import the data into Excel, a feature previously available only on our other supported platforms.

Why is this important, you may ask? For large companies such as the clients with whom we worked to provide IBM LUM support, this data is crucial, because these companies depend on heavyweight applications, such as Catia, in their daily operations.

Denied user statistics provide critically important information for network license management systems, allowing you to understand when and how often people are prevented from doing their work.

No denials might be a clear indication that you're over-licensed. However, a high denial rate is equally bad, because it’s a clear indication that you might need more licenses. How many licenses are enough? You can apply filters to the statistics that License Statistics exports, such as mean values on the number of denials, to more clearly see trends on how denials occur in your system.

License Statistics surpasses the competition as a software license management solution by providing this functionality, which further improves the statistics of Catia and other enterprise software applications, at no additional cost. Some of our competitors have made it sound as though software licensing is as complex as brain surgery. We prove that this is not the case.

On the heels of Apple's launch of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, X-Formation is the world's first software licensing vendor to officially announce its support with LM-X License Manager.

We're eager to see systems deployed with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and ready with software that supports it. Thanks to our advanced, automated testing procedures, we can quickly adapt our software for new systems, enabling us to bring you support for the new OS X within hours of its release.

Once again, we at X-Formation are happy to deliver new tools and pride ourselves on our ability to deliver faster support and turnaround times than our competitors, while continuing to maintain a high standard for new software development.

Read more about LM-X License Manager.

In larger corporations and enterprises, inaccessibility to expensive software is not an option. Users must be able to access software at any time of day, and redundant licensing is essential for ensuring this level of guaranteed accessibility. Recognizing this need, we have implemented high availability licensing in the most recent version of LM-X License Manager.

Although market leaders have long provided redundant license servers and triad license server solutions, many of these systems have been far too easy to configure incorrectly. Looking at a competitor who recently introduced a very weak fail-over method that performs only a one-way connection check, we see it would be easy to break their system using a simple firewall. This leads to potential overuse, an obvious and serious drawback. Another problem we’ve often seen is that the dynamic master scheduling algorithm causes all the servers to be unstable, so that ultimately nothing works.

Learning from such examples, we've spent significant time ensuring that our system cannot be erroneously configured. We've introduced a model where three servers are required and set up with static roles. Our solution enforces a two-way license server check that ensures a majority of servers are working before serving licenses. It's virtually impossible to incorrectly configure the system, because it actively refuses to start if users don't have identical, proper settings on all three servers. This approach avoids all the clumsiness to which existing solutions are prone, and leaves it up to the end-users to define their server roles.

Designing our high availability licensing in this way, we've taken a step further toward providing an innovative solution to license failures. A solution without the expense of potential license overuse resulting from a weak one-way checking model, and without all the setup hassle and potential configuration errors. Supporting our License Statistics software, we deal with end users of different licensing systems every day, and we’ve learned that end users benefit from a simpler, more straightforward approach instead of being overwhelmed by options. Recognizing this, we've kept both simplicity and security in mind--benefits that some of our competitors have failed to address.

In a software market where the right licensing solutions can contribute to a software vendor’s success, no one wants to take unnecessary risks. This is why large corporations are choosing us as a better alternative to the market leaders. We understand that users want flexibility, simplicity, and reasonably priced products, and we help software vendors avoid risks by providing license solutions that work. What’s more, most problems reported by our customers are solved within 24 hours, a claim that our competitors cannot make.

High availability licensing is included with LM-X License Manager at no additional cost.

The newest addition to our product line is License Distribution Service, which gives you an even smoother experience using LM-X License Manager.

License Distribution Service is a license fulfillment system that allows your users to activate software on demand. It streamlines the entire licensing process, from customer ordering to users getting up and running with their new software.

One of the most important benefits License Distribution Service provides is the ability to automate manual tasks, such as obtaining hostids and sending out licenses on demand. License Distribution Service helps you enable 24/7 self-service for your customers, getting them up and running much faster and reducing the need for sales and support services.

Here are some highlights of what you can do with License Distribution Service:

• Enable self-service for end users to get them up and running much faster.
• Set software to expire relative to activation time instead of purchase time.
• Allow subscription-based software purchasing.
• Improve interaction with resellers around the world.
• Integrate with your existing CRM, webportal, ERP system or automated processes.
• Customize the end user’s interface to license activation.
• Minimize time for manual license operations by letting the system do it for you.
• Use with LM-X License Manager or other 3rd party licensing systems such as FLEXlm and FLEXnet.
• Create bulk license orders.

License Distribution Service is a programmable system that you can integrate with your existing environment. The flexibility of License Distribution Service lets you create additional services on top of the system to solve your business goals of today and tomorrow.

License Distribution Service is included with LM-X License Manager.

Contact us today and find out how LM-X License Manager and License Distribution Service can help you make licensing easier for yourself and your end users and improve your ROI.

With our next release of LM-X License Manager, we're also introducing a new license model we call "LM-X for Free." This license model lets you get LM-X License Manager at absolutely ZERO cost when you meet our qualifications.

If you're shipping network licenses of your product, it would be beneficial for your customers to track their network license usage to ensure the end users' needs are being met. Our product License Statistics is used by both small and large companies for tracking license usage. The software works with a number of license managers, including LM-X and others. Therefore, it's an ideal component in your customers' environment to track all their network-license-based software, regardless whether the software uses LM-X.

To participate in our "LM-X for Free" program, we would agree on a specific number of License Statistics sales that
are a direct result of your referrals to accumulate "bonus points" toward discounts. These discounts can ultimately add up to receiving LM-X for free.

By referring your end users to License Statistics, you not only get a savings for yourself; you also get satisfied users who know how many licenses they need and can perform educated purchases of your software, which in many cases can result in additional sales for you.

That's "LM-X for Free" in a nutshell.

Read more at LM-X license manager for free.

Are you interested in more information? We would be happy to discuss your licensing needs further.

Often, when I speak with customers I get the impression that most feel licensing software is inherently complicated, hard to manage and very expensive. And no wonder—this seems to have been the general approach of market leaders for the past 20 years. I personally believe it's time for a change. Licensing does not need to be complicated, include a thousand and one features that no one will ever use, or cost a fortune.

Legacy license management systems can be a pain. We realize this and so do our users. They want to get top quality products, see software improvements in the works, and get prompt attention and quick deliveries.

Just like our users, we too like to see our software progress and love to create new functionality to solve particular users’ situations.

The philosophy of both our license management products, License Statistics and LM-X License Manager, is not to solve every licensing problem in the whole world. Instead, we strive to make quality software that is open and ready for your extensions and customizations, so you are empowered to solve every licensing problem in your world.

Our products help both small and large companies solve problems today that they previously had to pay several times as much to solve. Pricing for LM-X starts at approximately 1000 EUR, and for License Statistics starts at just 150 EUR.

Currently, our software is used in industries like EDA, space, science, engineering, computer game manufacturing, electronics and more. Businesses using our products range from small start-ups to large Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

If you'd like an evaluation of our products, be sure to let us know. We would like to help you to solve your license management problems and become part of the X-Formation partnership.

We would like to introduce a new German License Statistics reseller, Infotech Enterprises GmbH. If you would like to purchase License Statistics from Infotech Enterprises GmbH and receive support in German, we encourage you to contact them.


Mollenbachstraße 37
71229 Leonberg

Phone: +49-7152-9452-0
Email: info@infotechsw.de
Website: http://www.infotechsw.de
License Statistics web page: http://www.infotechsw.de/deutsch/lic_stat.htm

I believe that today is a great day!

Why, you might ask? Because that is what I want it to be!

What we enjoy the most is helping real people with real licensing problems, without making them pay a fortune for our solutions.

We welcome customer feedback, since it enables us to both improve our software and help out our users. We estimate that we've improved our applications, LM-X and License Statistics, to solve specific problems for more than half our users. Sometimes, the changes have been small issues that took 5 minutes to work out. Other times, we've improved our software to accommodate more than 10 feature requests from a single customer. In the majority of cases, software improvements are made without any additional costs for our users.

On average, our bug fixing time is far under 24 hours. Plus, we're continually improving our techniques, so the likelihood of future software problems is steadily decreasing.

Today, our software is being used by more than 70 companies in various industries, such as computer game manufacturing, electronics, EDA, architecture, digital entertainment, manufacturing, mechanical engineering, bioinformatics, mining and many others.

We see each of these companies as individuals with unique problems that we can help to solve. And we don't restrict our attention to only the biggest companies. We are interested in helping our customers regardless whether they’re a small startup company or a mega-corporation with annual sales of billions of dollars.

That’s just how we are...we help our customers because we enjoy it.

So, when I say that this is a great day, it’s because this is another day that I have the opportunity to help out our customers and satisfy their needs.

The large companies who use License Statistics generally have hundreds of licenses. In some cases, we've had the opportunity to work with companies who have a few thousand licenses, which is quite a significant number of licenses to monitor.

However, we've recently been working with a large organization whose license monitoring requirements are a magnitude greater than any we have encountered thus far. This particular organization has up to about 12,000 CITRIX licenses serving many thousands of users daily.

As this customer pointed out, they had a hard time finding vendors capable of meeting their requirements. Most vendors would never be able to support their requirements, because their monitoring techniques would be incapable of handling the large scale of the company’s setup, which involves a great number of machines. With so many users and licenses, their enterprise environment jumps to a new level, where speed of software and optimization of algorithms become crucial. License Statistics was able to meet the challenge.

Working with this organization, we optimized License Statistics to be capable of monitoring this type of large-scale enterprise environment. With only a few days of work, we managed to cut down graph generation time by up to a factor of 10. Currently, creating the graphs for this site takes only about 2 minutes.

We've been quite satisfied with the results so far. Due to License Statistics’ straightforward interface, it didn't take long to make the adjustments needed to accommodate this customer’s requirements.





The above figure shows a set of CITRIX licenses we've captured together with this particular customer. It shows more than 8000 licenses being used at once. An interesting observation is that their license utilization is quite good, as about 8000 licenses are used a significant share of the time.

When tracking licenses, you need the flexibility to view exactly the types of reports that you care about. For example, what if management asks you for a report that compares application A with application B? Or how about showing the combined behavior of two departments as one graph?

These may seem like common, simple tasks, but actually delivering on these kinds of requests certainly is not trivial to accomplish. We've witnessed users creating their own customs scripts to solve such reporting challenges with a varying degree of success.

Now we are able to provide you with custom graphs as they should be done. Effortlessly.

Working closely with our customers, we have created an open engine that allows you to make custom graphs beyond the extent of what License Statistics’ competitors offer. Best of all, custom reporting is available at no extra cost when you purchase License Statistics, starting at only 150 EUR.

Our custom reporting utility lets you generate almost any type of report you could imagine, based on usage, users or groups. All of these reports include graphs representing usage based on your specifications. You can select the start and end time of a report; define whether you want to see daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even yearly statistics; narrow down results using filters that include or exclude applications, users or groups; and control what the results look like.

All in all, our custom graphing engine gives you more than 15 different graph types, letting you provide your organization with the results needed. It is an ideal tool to let you quickly answer questions such as, "What is our usage of XYZ compared with ABC?"

Here are just a few examples of custom reports you can create:

- A user-based graph that shows user performance on a monthly basis for a specific product
- A usage report of products A, B, C and D within a single graph that shows a side-by-side comparison of each product’s usage
- Weekly graphs showing group-based usage
- An annual report of servers A and B merged together as one graph -- even though the servers are in different physical locations



The above figure shows an example of a custom report. Here we have 5 applications compared with one another within the same view, represented as a monthly report.

Custom reporting is easy to set up and can be scheduled to give you updates on an automatic basis. Additionally, you can share the HTML pages throughout your organization without installing 3rd party software on all your machines, making it easy to distribute usage tracking information to your group or department.