We were curious why companies switch away from their internally developed license management software in favor of an off-the-shelf solution.  So we asked some of our customers what motivated them to switch.

What they told us is that, although software licensing solutions are not particularly difficult to write, they are often difficult to manage over time. They need care and feeding, and most companies don’t have the time or interest to continue down that road.

Reasons we heard for switching to a commercial license manager:

• expand platform coverage (add support for 64bit Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, etc.)
• spend less time on support (re-focus developers on core functionality)
• fix what had become a perceived product weakness
• add new license types, (floating, named-user, tokens, etc.),
• migrate away from hardware keys or dongles,
• create additional billable application features,
• reduce the number of separate product  builds,
• create new functional levels (Lite, Pro, Platinum, etc),
• produce usage reports for post-use-billing,
• deploy licenses using Internet Activation

Our customers were happy to drop their home-brew license manager to devote more development energy on the features that make their software stand out over the competition.