Entries by Henrik Goldman

During 2007, a competing product, Samreport, will be discontinued. The vendor of this software has a larger enterprise solution, FLEXnet Manager, that will provide the same functionality as Samreport plus much more. However this comes with a price increase.

We feel license management should be available to anyone. Unlike our competition, we don't think software like this is rocket science, and we keep our prices appropriately reasonable. License Statistics prices start at just 150 EUR.

License Statistics currently accomplishes all that Samreport does today. In some cases, our software can provide even more, because its open framework lets you easily extend its usage by employing simple scripts.

We care about our customers and want to give you a better alternative than paying more than you should for effective license monitoring. From now until the end of 2007, we are offering Samreport users a 10% discount on the purchase of License Statistics.

This is a time-limited offer and is considered on a case-by-case basis to ensure compliance with this terms of the offer.

We like having contact with our costumers. In fact, we believe that maintaining close connections with our customers is vital. Our aspiration is to get away from the usual vendor-customer relationship and instead foster partnerships.

During January, I enjoyed a vacation in mile-high Denver, Colorado, where I had the opportunity to meet with several companies. One of these companies was Enventive Engineering, an LM-X user that develops state-of-the-art software solutions for mechanical engineering. During our visit, we discussed plans for our future relationship and delved into various issues related to licensing that are a problem within the industry today.

More specifically, we converged on a common goal to improve LM-X in several ways that will make it easier for end-users to use and understand.



I met with Enventive CEO Ralph Gifford, on the right, while in Denver. The beautiful foothills of Boulder, a city near Denver, provided a scenic backdrop.

One of the benefits of License Statistics is its flexibility: it's modular, easy to use and easy to extend. Many of our customers have used License Statistics with a variety of scripts that help them get exactly the information they want from their license statistics data.

One of the recent requests we've had is the ability to run custom scripts at the same schedule as License Statistics runs. In answer to this request, we've implemented a technique called "hooks," which lets you run your own custom post-processing tools at the time of statistics updates. For example, you can use hooks to run scripts that list when applications are about to expire or check whether users have licenses checked out for too long.

License Statistics already includes a number of scripts you can run and can use as examples to create your own custom scripts. We are happy to improve our software further by providing hooks that make using scripts even more powerful.

The upcoming version of License Statistics will generate graphs faster and consume less memory.
We reworked the engine of License Statistics to improve the program's speed (by implemented caching) and greatly reduce the memory requirements. In some cases, License Statistics is now as much as 80% to 90% faster.

This enhancement is a result of a user request. As always, we are interested in improving our software and responding to your needs. Improving the performance of License Statistics is just one of the many steps we've made towards giving you the best possible experience with our software.

Future versions of LM-X will be able to use hard disks as hostid's under Windows.
This is an important step for us, because some competitors have previously allowed users to use DOS-formatted disk ID's. However, our hostid algorithm uses the real hardware information, making it robust and strong.

Hi Everyone,

2006 was a very busy year for us, and we expect 2007 to be just as eventful.

For 2007, we have numerous ideas in the works, which we will be presenting over the coming months. We have exciting plans to extend License Statistics and add several new features to LM-X.

Our goal for 2007 is to continue where we left off in 2006:

- Offer competitive prices for our products
- Deliver high-quality, personal product support
- Listen to your needs and solve your problems

In our many dealings with software companies, we've all come across those less-than-friendly software sales or support people who have no interest in helping us with our needs. At X-Formation, we want to change that. Our objective remains to deliver solutions to your individual problems, not just deliver a product. One of the things our customers appreciate most is the fact that we listen to their needs and improve our software accordingly.

Although we're a small company and some product enhancements can take time to implement, you can trust that we spend almost every day concentrating on making our products more full-featured, intuitive and easier to use.

In celebration of the new year, we've decided to cut the prices of normal licenses for License Statistics by 30%, while at the same time adding several new features you have requested.

We are looking forward to having more close contact with our users in the new year. So far, we've been very happy to have successfully fulfilled the majority of product enhancement requests we've had. We'll continue to work just as hard in 2007 to ensure you remain a satisfied customer.

Like anyone, we enjoy getting positive feedback about a job well done. Unlike some, we also want to hear from our customers about ways we can improve on what we already have. We recognize the importance of taking the time to listen to our customers and work closely with them to support their specific needs and help them to succeed.

One such success story is Enventive Engineering, Inc. We've worked together with Enventive to get their account of what made them choose LM-X over the leading license management solution on the market. Enventive's end-users of LM-X include Fortune 500 companies, so it's vital to Enventive and to us that LM-X is easy to use, full-featured, and flexible.

Find out what Enventive has to say about LM-X in our recently published case study: http://www.x-formation.com/lm-x_license_manager/lm-x_enventive_casestudy.html

With the upcoming version of our license manager LM-X, we will increase our Solaris OS support to include x64, on par with our other supported platforms.
In keeping with our goals to support our users operating systems, and recognizing that Sun is increasingly promoting x64, we feel it's important that LM-X also supports this OS.

Recently, we've received some requests on how to most quickly and easily set up License Statistics for doing FLEXlm license reporting. To help people get started right away using License Statistics, we've written a one-page Quick Start guide that helps you set up and run License Statistics in just 10 minutes. While the majority of people tell us that our software is easy to install, maintain and use, this Quick Start guide boils down the setup procedure to make getting started with License Statistics even simpler.

http://www.x-formation.com/pdf/LicenseStatisticsQuickStart.pdf

Do you understand how well your software licenses are being used?

Our solution, License Statistics, helps you track who is using your software licenses and how much your licenses are being used.

We are now making it even easier for you to manage your licenses. Between now and the end of this year you may purchase License Statistics at a 40% discount.

Are you interested in getting a new quote? Please let us know and let us help you manage the complexities of license management.

This offer covers normal licenses but not educational offers or site licenses and expires on December 31 2006.

When purchasing software licenses from a vendor, you often don't know if you have enough or too many licenses to meet your needs. Our license monitoring product, License Statistics, gives you the information you need to ensure you make the right purchases when it comes time to renew your licenses.

In addition to monitoring how many licenses are being used, the upcoming version of License Statistics will let you see the number of denied FLEXlm users, a feature that the majority of our competitors do not provide. By simply reviewing the license server log, you can easily see how many users are denied license checkout using a particular server, and how often the denials take place.

The latest version of LM-X features a new custom hostid comparison option, which lets you define how a license is locked to a host. Similar to Windows XP activation scheme, LM-X now allows for partial matching of hardware component checks used to lock a license, instead of demanding a strict one-to-one match. This functionality is custom-defined by you, the developer, giving you full control to implement the best algorithm for your particular scenario.

By offering this feature, LM-X increases its flexibility to give you greater influence over your licensing solution. And with LM-X, unlike some of our competitors, increased flexibility does not mean increased complexity. LM-X remains as straightforward and intuitive as ever.

This particular feature actually comes from a customer request, which shows how we do business. With our software, you don't just buy a product, but a solution to a problem. Our dedication to addressing your specific problems is evident by turning this and other customer requests into product features.

Want to hear how LM-X can solve your licensing problems? Let us know and get a free evaluation of LM-X.

With our most recent version of License Statistics, we have incorporated more flexibility by allowing you to do post-processing scripts. Unlike our competitor's products, License Statistics lets you create additional scripts that solve specific tasks.

One of the example scripts included with License Statistics emails the administrator when licenses are taken for more than 24 hours. You can use this script to detect users who fail to log off when they go home or to identify hung licenses. Another example script detects peak usage by writing a logfile when any license exceeds e.g. 95% usage.

The scripting process is quite simple, because you use XML to interface with the required information.

This feature makes our License Statistics package even more versatile, as you can do all sorts of trigger-based operations on your licenses.

Are you interested in how License Statistics can help you decrease your license costs? Get a free evaluation today!

How often do you ask a question like:
Which users are using the most licenses?
Which department takes up most licenses (for billing purposes)?
Which application was most used over the last month?

We're happy to announce that LM-X has extended it's support for Itanium architecture. LM-X now works with HP-UX on IPF, Linux on IA64, and Windows Server 2003 (64 bit) on IA64 (using Microsoft Platform SDK).

With this announcement, we now completely support desktop-based Windows releases: Win32, Win64 AMD64 and now also Win64 IA64.