“Software Monetization” – What does it mean to your business?

Industrial companies are increasingly using software as the driver of their future growth. Sustainable growth is fed by profits. But to grow profitably, you need to ensure that your software infrastructure has the proper licensing controls built-in, so that you can get paid for the fair use of your products.  This is what we mean by “software monetization”… turning your products, whether software or software-driven devices, into dynamic, profitable businesses.

Protect and Defend

The first step is IP protection. Adopt a technology that gives you a satisfactory degree of security to prevent unlicensed use, and to deter imitators (grey-markets) who would use your IP to compete against you. We all know that no software is totally hack-proof, but you have to make malicious attacks against your products non-trivial.

Control through SOFTWARE MONETIZATION

Once you have protection built-in, you can ensure that your customers fairly pay you for their use.  The best way to accomplish this is through tamper-proof licenses that specify the terms of use in the license. Licenses can define expiration dates, rights to future updates, where and how much of your software can be used, and license sharing attributes, among others.

SeamlessNESS

Consider how your customers will obtain licenses or activate your software. Fully leverage near ubiquitous connectivity to simplify installation and authentication, whether it is through in-product activation or by supporting floating licenses by deploying license servers in the Cloud. Your choices should reflect how your customers use your products, as well as their own preferences. For example, some customers will insist on staying off the public Internet, so make sure you have a strategy for these cases.

Shake the Trees

Increasing profitability comes from both your current base, as well as new markets. Monetization means extracting revenue from existing bases by giving them choices of new feature bundles, and by scaling price to the value that they receive. New pricing models, such as monthly/annual subscriptions, token-based licenses, and usage metering may cast a wider net into your existing markets. Perhaps a super-low price point, or even a free version is a way to broaden your base. Conversely, there may be valuable features that you currently bundle that could be offered as an up-sell opportunity. Monetization also means delivering totally new products/features using the same licensing technology to derive new sources of revenue.

Product Lifecycle

Your customers are always on the move, and that means your licenses have to move with them. With software licensing, you have mechanisms for customers to self-serve. After your customers easily convert a trial versions into paid versions, they can later move licenses to a new machine, or add new modules, or upgrade to a new release. In all cases, access is in their hands, but you are always in control.

Software licensing also helps manufacturers simplify supply chains by reducing the number of unique physical devices needed to address multiple market segments while extending the useful lifetimes of these devices.

Business Intelligence

What if you could know which parts of your products were used the most, how often? With software licensing, you can gather and monitor actionable product usage data, not just to calculate an invoice, but also to gain marketing insight into how your product is used, and where to allocate precious development resources.

Software licensing services easily tie into CRM and E-Commerce/payment platforms for speedy quote-to-cash.  This means timely revenue recognition and an improved customer experience.

Build on the Shoulders of Giants

In-house development of software monetization tools offers little competitive advantage. Worse, it can derail engineers from development of new features where true product differentiation and competitive advantage lives.

Fortunately, today’s software developers welcome the paradigm shift toward designs built on a combination of licensed code and in-house application software. By acquiring a 3rd-party software monetization solution rather than building it, development organizations enable themselves to focus their efforts on delivering more innovative products more quickly within shrinking market windows.