Sentinel Cloud Services Receives CODie 2012 Nomination

SIIA’s CODie Awards program has nominated SafeNet’s Sentinel Cloud Services as a finalist in the 27^th annual CODiE 2012 Awards in the Best Digital Rights Management Solution category.

Each year the SIIA’s judging experts review and identify all nominated products and services. In its 27 years of existence, the SIIA has recognized more than 1000 companies for achieving greatness in industries that expect innovative thinking and demand market validation.

From the CODiE Awards website:  “SIIA awards the solution that best allows the secure electronic purchase, distribution and subsequent use of software and/or information based on the rigorous criterion.”

The winners will be announced on January 24, 2012 during a special dinner held in conjunction with the Information Industry Summit.  Receiving this nomination is a significant accomplishment for the entire Sentinel Cloud team who has worked tirelessly to provide the industry’s only complete and proven solution for software monetization in the cloud. 

Sentinel Cloud Services makes it quick and easy for SaaS providers to build versatile service catalogs, provision and authorize user access, measure service usage, and instantly adapt their service offerings to embrace new and evolving market opportunities.  For more information about Sentinel Cloud Services, you can visit http://www.sentinelcloud.com.

 

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

by Chris Holland

HR 3261, or the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is currently being considered in the US congress.  Like most legislation that deals with the Internet, it comes with a certain amount of controversy.

At its heart, the bill is designed to help prevent the illegal distribution of intellectual property – music, movies, software, books, periodicals and so on.  Even today the notion of copying media is still somehow not perceived as stealing by many people.  While walking in to a bookstore or music store and taking something without paying for it is clearly understood to be stealing, many people don’t consider the download of the same material to be illegal.  It is.  Regardless of the legality – when people stop to think about it – they realize that it is morally wrong.

In Licensing, The Best Defense is a Great Offense

by Prakash Panjwani

Diehard baseball fans like me have found ourselves at the end of one of the best seasons Major League Baseball has had in years.  What truly distinguished this season is that the old adage of “defense wins titles” didn’t quite pan out. Instead, we got to see teams with ordinary starting pitching somehow make it to the championship games. 

Focusing on offense over defense seems to be the trend lately in the software world too.  

SafeNet voyages further into the cloud with Amazon and Dell Boomi partnerships

By: Michael Welch

We’re cloud-bound and moving full steam ahead!  Earlier this year, we transitioned from Beta and announced the general release of our Sentinel Cloud Services. Since then, our focus has been devoted toward customer evaluations and updates for upcoming releases.

Now, our cloud momentum increases as we forge partnerships with Amazon and Dell Boomi! See how these collaborations can get you up and running in the cloud even faster:

Dell Boomi
The Dell Boomi AtomSphere is delivered as-a-service to integrate two or more SaaS or on-premise applications. Sentinel Cloud has a connector on Dell Boomi’s AtomSphere platform greatly reducing time-to-market for software providers by simplifying back office integration processes associated with cloud service licensing and entitlement management.  Now with Sentinel Cloud, you can begin building versatile service catalogs, provisioning and authorizing user access, measuring service usage, and instantly adapting service offerings to embrace new and evolving market opportunities without having to worry about lengthy back office integration processes. Stated by, Rick Nucci, CTO, Dell Boomi, “Our connector with SafeNet is another step towards simplifying the integration work associated with cloud service delivery.”

Amazon – AWS Services
SafeNet and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have teamed up to ensure a clear path to success for software vendors bringing to market services in the cloud. AWS has recently introduced the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Program. Qualified AWS ISVs who enter into this program are eligible for a range of benefits focused on helping them succeed with AWS customers and projects. These benefits may include sales, marketing, PR, technical, and alliance support advantages. SafeNet is proud to not only be an official AWS partner but to be a member of the AWS ISV Program.  

With allies like Dell Boomi and Amazon, we can better help our customers transition into the Cloud today, tomorrow…or whenever YOU are ready to take that next step. 

 

Building Your License Enforcement Business Case

by Dave DiMillo

 

This is a multi-part blog where we'll look at the business case around a license enforcement system from many different angles.  This article will begin the discussion surrounding the initial business case for initiating a license enforcement project. Follow-on blogs will focus on measuring the return on the investment of a licensing system after implementation.

 

Questions you will need to answer

Your business case will need to answer the following questions.  Rest assured your executive team will ask the questions so you best be able to answer them.

• Why are we doing this?
• What is the anticipated impact on my sales teams?
• What are my customers going to think?
• What is this project really going to cost?
• What can we expect to get out of this project and where?
• Is this worth it?
• Can we afford to do nothing?

 

Why are we doing this?

Most companies take on license enforcement projects with the primary goal of protecting their revenue stream or driving new revenue. There are certainly other drivers but the almighty dollar is by far the leading reason companies go down this path. 

 

Consider this:

• A recent KPMG study found that 34% of companies surveyed reported software revenue losses of 20% or more due to non-compliance.
• The audit team for a  division of a top 10 software publisher found that their customers were out of license compliance across software versions 100% of the time. This means every customer they looked at had users running newer versions of the products than their support agreements reflected.

 

Be a bit careful with this one in your business case. It is a stretch to think every software publisher can immediately increase software licenses by 20% simply by introducing license enforcement.  But the facts are the facts… and the fact is that its common for ISV's customers to have more users than software licenses without the right tools that keep them from getting themselves in an unfavorable position.

Resist the urge to have your business case target a 20% recovery number out of the gate.  Consider the 20% the opportunity on the table. While it’s possible to recover a healthy portion of it, you should ask yourself what is a reasonable number to recover as your license enforcement system is probably not going to be designed to be 100% air tight.

 

 

What is the anticipated impact on my sales teams?

Your business case needs to cover the impact of the license enforcement on various stakeholders.  Your sales reps can be seriously affected if the project is not rolled out carefully.  Therefore, make sure you cover this angle.

 

Sales teams typically have two reactions to the notion of introducing license enforcement.  There is the camp of "hell yeah, this will keep my honest customers honest and the cash register ringing" and "oh no, I don't want my customers to have any barrier to adoption and I actually want them to find themselves using more licenses than they purchased".   And of course many of them want things both ways.

 

Consider this:

 

• In 2009, a company with license enforcement polled their sales reps and found that 96% of them believed they would not be able to achieve their quarterly revenue targets without the license enforcement system.
• Of the 96% of sales reps with a positive outlook on license enforcement, the average protection factor was 20%.  This means 96% of that company’s sales reps thought their customers would order 20% fewer licenses if it was not protected. (There is that 20% number again).

 

Those two statements alone speak volumes to me.  As we know, sales teams are coin-operated and tend to embrace practically any method that they feel will help them hit their number.  License enforcement is no exception.  However there are  few other things to take into account. 

• You may have sales reps that don't want any to add any friction that will prevent their customers from getting up and running quickly. This is a completely valid concern that needs to be heard and addressed by the product manager designing your licensing customer experience. Your business can't afford to have customers struggle out of the gate.  A good customer licensing experience is most definitely achievable with the right level of attention to detail in the design of the workflows.
• You may have sales reps with sensitive accounts where the rep believes license enforcement could be a problem. These tend to be larger accounts where the enterprise needs more flexibility or accounts that have unique licensing arrangements.  These are usually one-off situations that you can handle with creative one-off solutions using your licensing framework.
• After nearly 20 years working for ISV's before to SafeNet, I never had a situation where my team could not satisfy my customers' special license enforcement needs. It's strictly a matter of being able and willing to work with your sales teams and customers.

In my next blog we’ll look at the impact to the customer base when introducing license enforcement and practices that have helped make that transition smooth.