Summary: “Discovering RLM was a breath of fresh air. As it turns out, the guys who founded RLM were also those who initially worked on Flexnet. So right off the bat, this gave us confidence these folks knew what they were doing . RLM provided us with a time-limited trial version of their bits immediately. They were responsive from day one. Their technical support was flawless. It took one of our engineers half a day to integrate the RLM software with our 64-bit product. The process to generate license files was also quite simple and well documented. That, combined with an attractive price-point, convinced us to go with Reprise. We have been running the RLM licensing for half a year now without a hitch. Looking back, we know we made the right decision in choosing Reprise Software for our licensing needs.”

About XSPRADA Corporation:

XSPRADA and RLM licensing
XSPRADA is a new-breed player in the high-performance analytical database market. Our product, called RDM/x (Relational Data Miner Express Edition) is a database engine designed for strategic and tactical business intelligence work for OLAP and data mining in large data warehousing applications.

Currently RDM/x only runs on Windows Server platforms, and it presents as a small Windows Service application (and associated ODBC drivers) that people can download and install from our website at www.xsprada.com.

License Policies
Given our deployment model and the types of markets we target, we wanted to be able to license our software in three different ways. One is a trial version, which is time-limited. This is for people who want to try out our software for 30 days before making a purchase decision. Another is a developer version. In this version, the software is fully functional but capped at a certain data volume (say for example, 10 or 100GB). This is more convenient for long-term proof-of-concept projects in research environments. The last is the enterprise version which is the official release and is tied to a specific machine (node-locked) via a customer-provided MAC address.

Simplicity was Key
Another requirement was for our licensing software to support multiple platforms in anticipation of our upcoming Linux release. Additionally, we wanted an easy-to-integrate product, as our engineers were busy putting our own product together, we did not want to be spending a lot of time on technical integration issues. The system also had to be extremely simple for the customer, as ease-of-use is one of our strongest value points. In other words, simplicity was an absolute must-have. Finally, beyond the technical issues, vendor support was going to be a major component of our purchase decision process.

We found only a few viable vendors
Licensing is a complex issue with potential ramifications on user experience and performance. We were not going to deal with a vendor unless support was “just-in-time.” Surprisingly, the software licensing vendor space is fairly limited. There are not too many serious players in this field. And finding them isn’t easy to begin with! In our search we looked at Agilis, Flexnet (from FlexEra, previously Acresso, previously Macrovision, also makers of InstallShield), Easysoft, and of course Reprise Software (RLM).

Some vendors were not suitable
Flexnet is clearly the big kahuna in this space. They “wrote the book.”  All 500 pages of it too. They were difficult to reach and there seemed to be a lot of confusion in their sales department. Judging from the sheer size and complexity of the product, combined with lackluster customer support and follow-up, we decided to look elsewhere. We found similar issues with other vendors. Some didn’t seem viable while others had limited functionality (as in not supporting multiple platforms, for example).

RLM – Right Product at the Right Time
Discovering RLM was a breath of fresh air. As it turns out, the guys who founded RLM were also those who initially worked on Flexnet. So right off the bat, this gave us confidence these folks knew what they were doing . RLM provided us with a time-limited trial version of their bits immediately. They were responsive from day one. Their technical support was flawless. It took one of our engineers half a day to integrate the RLM software with our 64-bit product. The process to generate license files was also quite simple and well documented. That, combined with an attractive price-point, convinced us to go with Reprise. We have been running the RLM licensing for half a year now without a hitch. Looking back, we know we made the right decision in choosing Reprise Software for our licensing needs.