You may notice a delay in support response times during our summer holiday period, between July 20 and August 15, 2008. We appreciate your patience, and will continue to do our best to resolve support issues as quickly as possible during this time.

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.

We're pleased to announce special, discounted prices on License Statistics for summer.

Through August 1, 2008, we're offering a 30% discount on License Statistics for use with up to 200 licenses/users. We're extending this offer to new customers and to existing customers who wish to upgrade their current licensing.

To learn more details about License Statistics pricing and these discounts, or to request a price quote, contact us today!

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.

Today's world is fast-moving and ever-changing. Our traditional notion of the relationship between software vendors and customers is being reinvented with offerings of new services and "Web 2.0" advancements that facilitate ready, easy access to information and sharing of ideas throughout a user community.

Recognizing the value of this new definition of the vendor-customer relationship, we want to be proactive in enabling you, the customer, to be the center of what drives our product development. By embracing the practice of customer driven development, we let you share your voice and truly be heard.

Regardless whether you're a long-term X-Formation customer or you're just getting started with our products, your opinions are important to us. By giving you access to our issue tracker we encourage you to contribute your ideas and feedback and stay informed about what we're working on. This way, you can actively participate in our development process and ensure that issues important to you are being addressed in an upcoming release of our software.

If you haven't yet visited our issue tracker, we invite you to log in soon and start being a part of your own success with our products.

We’ve often been asked how well LM-X License Manager scales, and whether we can handle enterprise environments.

As many as 100 simultaneous network connections are typical, and all our LM-X distributions on supported platforms fulfill this need with 20 independent license checkout times of less than 800 ms. This in itself is noteworthy, considering the operations that take place.

In order to satisfy an increasing demand, we've spent additional time making platform-specific optimizations, including optimizations for Windows. This has allowed us to scale to at least 3000 concurrent license clients simultaneously. Our tests have shown that with simultaneous 500 connections is no problem even on small systems.

Naturally, these results have been proven only for the specific release we've tested on. But can you rely on those results in future software versions, when functionality increases?

The answer to this question is “yes.” Each build of LM-X undergoes a long series of regression tests several times a day that catches all possible "hiccups," so we can guarantee consistent results from one release to the next. Our products undergo these tests up to 10 times a day, giving both ourselves and you the reassurance that our software quality meets expectations.

Arhus, Denmark – January 22, 2008 – X-Formation recently improved its small business offer for their license management software, LM-X License Manager. Under the Small Business Licensing program, qualifying businesses get all the features and support included with other LM-X pricing models for only 800 EUR. The program is designed to help growing businesses obtain a professional, robust and dependable license management solution without paying the high price of competing license management products.

Since introducing this pricing model, several companies have taken advantage of the offer. One such success story is SRI International, an independent, nonprofit scientific research institute. In addition to LM-X License Manager’s low startup cost, SRI found that LM-X was simply the best solution when compared to other license managers.

"SRI International has been evaluating license systems for a new line of software. Our key criteria were cross-platform support (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), ease of use and complete in terms of features,” explained Regis Vincent, Program Manager at SRI International. “We wanted the ability to generate time-limited version, floating licenses and MAC address limited licenses. LM-X can do it all.”

As SRI discovered, LM-X not only has the features they need at half the cost of the competition, it is also easy to implement and use, and X-Formation provided them with quick, responsive customer support.

“We found during our evaluation that X-Formation was extremely helpful, and we went from evaluation to a product release in less than 1 month,” said Mr. Vincent.

LM-X License Manager fulfills the most simple to the most complex license management needs, for small companies to large enterprises. LM-X focuses on both simplicity and strong security, accommodating a range of distribution methods and customer preferences, including node-locked and floating licenses.

X-Formation is a leading provider in software licensing technology, dedicated to providing an end-to-end solution for license management needs, from licensing software products, to distributing the products to end users, to enabling end users to monitor license usage. With over a decade of experience in the area of license management, X-Formation understands the problems ISVs and their end users face and knows how to solve them.

To learn more about X-Formation's products, call or email:

General information: info@X-Formation.com
Sales inquiries: sales@X-Formation.com
Denmark Office: +45 30228575

Do you have a question about getting License Statistics up and running? Want to know what license policies LM-X supports? Find out how to resolve a FLEXlm-specific issue?

We are pleased to announce that the X-Formation Knowledgebase is now available to answer your questions with zero wait time. The Knowledgebase contains answers to frequently asked questions about License Statistics and LM-X, offers helpful information on related issues, and more. Providing all of this information at your fingertips is yet another way that we are improving our support to best serve our user community.

Rest assured, if your question isn't yet addressed in the Knowledgebase, you still have the same direct access to and speedy response from our support group that you've come to expect. If your question is one of general interest to others, we'll add it to the Knowledgebase to benefit everyone.

You can log into the X-Formation Knowledgebase at http://kb.x-formation.com. We are constantly expanding upon the pool of knowledge, so be sure to check the X-Formation Knowledgebase anytime you have a question or need to resolve an issue.

Are you a small business looking for a license manager that doesn't cost a fortune and can compete with the leaders in the field? In order to help small businesses get started with our license management software, we've improved our small business offer. If you meet qualifying criteria, you can start using LM-X License Manager at a flat annual fee of only 800 EUR.

And what do you get for 800 EUR? A robust License Manager that’s easy to implement and use and has all the features you’re looking for:

- Support for .NET, Java and C / C++

- Support for about 15 different computer platforms

- Support for a variety of license models, including anonymous trial licenses, local/node-locked licensing, and network/floating licensing, which can be configured for practically any needs.

- Support for automatic license server discovery, which results in an improved experience for your customers. We make licensing invisible for end users so they can concentrate on what’s essential to them -- their work -- and not on daily license administration.

- Support for advanced network licensing, such as client-side load balancing, high-availability servers, and transparent switch-over, which all serve the purpose of keeping software up and running so users won't have to focus on licensing when up against critical deadlines. Additionally, our system can easily handle hundreds of clients.

- A complete license fulfillment product that enables you to handle enterprise-level licensing. This system includes interaction with CRM systems, web portals, automatic purchase processes, accounting applications and more. Using this system also streamlines your software deployment process, enabling self-service for end users and demanding less support time from vendors.

- Fast support. We solve your problems within 24 hours.

- Responsive, customer-driven development. We listen to your input and improve our product accordingly.

Find out more about LM-X License Manager.