Many strange licensing quirks persist even from major vendors (such as calendar month licensing!) whilst other vendors still have no on-demand or short subscription others are moving towards more innovative licensing models.

Ultimately we believe that the accelerating growth of the cloud will deliver users to software vendors that embrace new business models at the expense of those that persist with traditional models and ignore the new opportunities that the cloud presents. To give an example, the cloud reduces friction and makes adoption significantly easier, this alone has the ability to allow innovative software vendors to expand their market share significantly.

Kind regards,

Robert

We have always maintained a strong view of virtualized environments as primarily being on a non-moving piece of equipment for the most part like a server application – or test environments for software development companies. Today, laptops are more powerful and even I run 2-3 virtualized environments on my own laptop for various business, development and testing purposes. This trend will continue.

Given those historical assumptions of 'use', and keep in mind we have not had any customers gripe about our policy yet, we have decided never let software be 'checked-out' or 'node-locked' to a virtual environment. It basically makes 'no sense' to do that for software running in a virtualized environment – software companies lose control of the licensing immediately if it is permitted.

So it is not just in our interest as a licensing company, but also in the interest of our customers to -not- allow licensing to be completely delivered in that scenario. The customer's software -must- call home, and since Nitro-LM is effectively 1-time zone and 1-point of accountability, there is only 1 answer as to whether a license is available or not. This applies for server applications, as well as standardly installed client applications.

When you remove licensing from the control of your customers – you can actually manage it. Otherwise the likely hood of 'theft' or use beyond the terms and conditions skyrockets – especially outside of the USA and EU.

ALSO – One of the biggest problems that I see is that the existing software business models (with exception of Software as a Service – SaaS) are not keeping up with the technology. This is especially true with regards to virtualization. The End User License Agreement (EULA) can 'threaten' or outline a 'policy' – but in the end, the software developer has no control over the end user when the approach to actually licensing the product does not actually 'enforce' the EULA. This costs companies Billions (yes, with a “B”) in revenue.

Had a look at the the blog and see that there is a requirement for on-line connections – how does this work when the Internet is not available or possible?

Steve

Steve

Steve

Given that this licensing solution is online – how does one deal with the following:

Working in an airplane – no Internet
Working inside a firewall or secure area – no Internet
Internet connection failure

Interested in more details.

Steve

As always we will see the necessary flexibility from small vendors while big vendors like Microsoft will act like they are unaware of the problem and will keep licensing per VM.

There are still tons of things to handle before cloud computing will be mainstream and licensing is surely one of those issues.

Our company has been on top of this before Virtualization went main-stream, and we have been advising our customers of this risk for some time. Here is a blog entry on this very subject:

http://www.nitrolm.com/blog/2007/10/16/virtuali…

The only way to deal with this is to move licensing outside of the dependencies of the VM. Nitro-LM is a perfect example of this – 'cloud' based licensing service. http://www.nitrolm.com