By Cris Wendt
Licensing and entitlement management are at the heart of what a software company does to create and maintain an ongoing and profitable relationship with their channel partners and end-users: They license their software using different license models to capture revenue, and, they "operationalize" these processes with entitlement management systems and processes. As companies mature in the market, their capacity to effectively license their products, and provide software only to entitled users becomes more critical to their success.
To test your licensing and entitlement IQ, how do you answer the following questions?
Is your company at the leading edge of providing new license models to meet market needs and seek competitive advantages? Some companies are very agile at offering a new license models, metrics, or product bundling/structure to meet market needs, while other software companies are trying to simply copy the successful companies "playbook" without understanding what they're trying to accomplish?
Do you delight your customers with internal systems and processes that result in the rapid turnaround of a purchase order to immediately grant access to software and license keys at a self-serve portal, or do you struggle to scale manual intensive processes that often result in an incorrect "entitlement"?
Are you able to master the integration of new software companies into your business fabric, or, do you seem paralyzed at the thought of integrating two companies product lines and process?
Do you have an ERP implementation that fails to help you understand who your customers are, and what configuration of software they own, or, do you have an entitlement management system that allows you to effectively manage customer relationships and effectively support and upsell to your customers?
Do you have high 85-95% maintenance and support renewal rates, or, do you have much lower rates of recurring revenue capture?
Companies that tend to do well in answering these questions and running an effective software business do so because they realize that they are not experts in licensing and entitlement management, just as they are not experts in accounting processes, CRM systems, or ERP. These companies rely on the expertise of a 3rd party such as Flexera Software to help them design, and architect an agile and flexible approach to licensing and entitlement management
For more information on why other companies turned to an external supplier of licensing and entitlement management solutions, please email whitepaper@flexerasoftware.com to receive your copy of the "Build vs. Buy" whitepaper.
