Points of View
Automating Licensing Operations
Geoff Surkamer, senior group vice president at License Technologies Group
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Software licenses are the lifeblood of your business. They stimulate revenue generation via new entitlements and renewals. They contain a wealth of information that offers insights into how to market to customers. And they help you provide better customer experiences by enabling faster and more accurate service. By improving the way you manage licenses through automation, you can gain tremendous competitive advantage.
As we all know, however, it can be extremely difficult to get a handle on which customers have licensed which software, and how they are using it, for several reasons. Most publishers rely on the channel to manage and track customer licensing data, and these partners simply don't gather all the data you need. The customers themselves often don't know what their subscriptions entitle, where they reside or when they terminate.
Because of this, many publishers cobble together and manually manage licensing data. They live with holes and errors, not knowing exactly how software moves through tiered channels to end-users, how to increase renewal revenue, and how to cross-sell and upsell. If their system isn't fully automated, they can't quickly scale or accommodate to changes in strategy. These challenges are exacerbated for publishers that have gone through mergers or acquisitions.
Automating software licensing management changes all that. With complete, accurate data on everything from pricing options and contract specifics to products used, order history and termination timeframes, it enables you to optimize revenue streams through renewals and upselling. With integrated, streamlined systems, you can react quickly to changes in product, sales and channel strategies, and competitor actions.
A comprehensive, unified and automated licensing management system puts you in control of your business, helping you increase revenue.
You can achieve this by building a license management system using existing ERP and CRM infrastructures. Some IT departments opt to do this themselves. However, this requires diverting resources from other projects and, because publisher IT staffs typically aren't experts in license management technology, it often results in systems lacking full functionality. Or, you can pay consultants to build it out and then pay them again every time you run into a problem or need to make changes.
A more straight-forward, effective approach is to integrate your back-end infrastructure with a proven system for managing the entire licensing lifecycle. The right implementation will give you the flexibility and power needed to react quickly to business changes, competitive landscape and security challenges; enable you to more effectively manage your channel; drive extraneous costs out of your system; and protect and extend the value of your ERP and CRM investments.
The bottom line is this: an effective licensing management system will enable you to improve the customer experience, more easily drive revenue into your business, and it will integrate into your operations without any disruption.
So, what should you look for when evaluating a licensing system? Make sure it can automate the entire licensing lifecycle, including customer, product, contract and order management. Specifically, it should:
- Enable you to view and manage orders in real-time, from end-users through resellers and distributors via a hierarchical model
- Make it easy to handle complex entitlement data for licenses, maintenance, subscription and support/services
- Link products for upsell and cross-sell opportunities
- Integrate with your ERP and CRM systems
- Maintain all your critical customer contract and agreement licensing data, including start dates, end dates, performance, discounts, price bands and milestones
- Enforce business rules around volume licensing programs, such as points, performance, milestones, media and doc, and minimum re-orders
- Provide flexibility so orders can be accepted via EDI, XML, or over the web from end-users and partners
- Create the foundation for electronic software delivery and streamlined eCommerce
- Be field-tested and proven to improve licensing operations for software publishers
Licensing is complex, but managing it doesn't have to be. By automating licensing operations you not only gain efficiencies and flexibility, you optimize revenue streams through smarter, more effective sales and marketing. The longer you wait to automate, the more money you're leaving on the table.
Geoff Surkamer is senior group vice president at License Technologies Group (LTG).
LTG is the leading software licensing services provider for software publishers and their partners. LTG's software licensing and technology expertise, global capabilities, and extreme customer focus provide publishers and their partners with industry-leading software licensing and eCommerce solutions including licenselink® and commercelaunch™. LTG solutions allow publishers to grow their businesses faster by optimizing operations, driving new revenue opportunities, and enhancing partner and end-user experiences. For more information, visit www.licensetech.com
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