10 REASONSWhy You Should Leverage

a Commercial Software Monetization Solution

Build or Buy Series

Software Monetization is the key to maximizing the value of and revenue from your valuable IP – but howwill you do it?

Unless you have unlimited resources – time, money and people – and can afford to shift your focus off your core competencies – you’ll want to leverage a commercial, off-the-shelf Software Monetization solution.

HERE ARE 10 REASONS WHY.

BUILD BUY

1. FUTURE-PROOFING FOR MARKET ADVANTAGE

Commercial Software Monetization solutions – those that are readily available in the market place, not internally built or homegrown - will ALWAYS have more functionality, more associated best practices, and more industry use cases, allowing you to design a solution that will meet your needs today and in the future.

FYICompanies that need to offer new license models frequently, and who build competitive differentiation with licensing and pricing

models, rely on commercial offerings.

Further, a commercial solution provides product agility like being able to proactively change product packaging, software licensing models and pricing to take advantage of market opportunities.

Commercial solutions are ready to go and have many associated best-practices and implementation use cases for a variety of processes, license models, and customer-facing interfaces associated with Software Monetization.

Unlike internally built solutions, the deployment of a commercial solution doesn’t suffer from things like endless internal development cycles to define and refine requirements for systems and processes that most companies don’t fully understand.

2. FASTER TIME-TO-BENEFIT

3. TUNED TO THE SOFTWARE BUSINESS

Commercial solutions provide effective support for the software product lifecycle – the morphing of products over time due to upgrades, updates, transfers, end-of-life, mergers & acquisitions and more.

Producers that use internally-developed systems tend to lose track of their customer entitlements over the lifecycle of their products, resulting in lost renewal or upgrade revenue, manual processes, and ultimately, customer dissatisfaction.

Hardware companies that are monetizing the software on their devices need to be particularly in-tune with the ability to manage their digital assets as software has very different characteristics than physical assets.

4. CORE COMPETENCY FOCUS

Companies shouldn’t use their best product and IT development resources investing in the development of licensing technology and entitlement management platforms.

They should use their top talent to focus on the development of market-leading products in their areas of core competency.

CORE COMPETENCY

5. BUSINESS SCALABILITY

Companies that buy a commercial Software Monetization solution tend to standardize on that solution across their range of product offerings and business processes, lowering operational and development costs via reusable and standard components while eliminating manual processes.

WARNING!Companies that build solutions tend to continually expand

their software monetization requirements as they acquire new companies, never standardizing on a single approach, as

each approach is tuned to a particular software title.

This lack of a standard solution typically results in a poor

customer experience as end-users are faced with different

use experiences and an inability to easily access their respective

entitlements.

6. LIFECYCLE PRODUCTIVITY

Over time, resources once applied to the development of homegrown licensing and entitlement management capabilities tend to move on to other projects, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find resources to manage changes to a Software Monetization solution that is required to remain competitive in the market.

As a result, solutions cannot grow to meet the needs of an evolving market, typically leading to higher internal support costs, and possibly affecting the product side with increased discounts and erosion of market position as companies can’t easily adjust to what the market needs.

7. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Commercial Software Monetization solutions have a breadth of usage reporting and compliance management capabilities that bring value to customers in the form of more effective license management, chargeback, workflow analysis, and the ability to control access to users on an as-needed basis.

These capabilities are rarely, if ever available with an internally developed system.

Further, these commercial solutions also have out-of-the-box customer-facing portals that enable 24 x 7 self-service to perform a number of administrative and compliance tasks – so that customers can get access to what they need when they need it, eliminating bottlenecks.

8. INCREASED REVENUE FROM ENTERPRISE AGREEMENTS

Commercial solutions provide usage reporting capabilities to enable software producers to optimize enterprise-level agreements for their largest customers based upon a mutually agreed usage and pricing formula.

It’s not uncommon for many software producers to obtain 50% or more of their revenue from a handful of accounts who have special, non-standard enterprise agreements.

PITFALLSThe inability to gather accurate usage information often results in software producers missing the opportunity to gather upside revenue that is built into the agreement because there is a lack of factual information.

More importantly, the availability of these capabilities enable software producers to pro-actively construct enterprise-level agreements that make it easier for their largest customers to consume large amounts of software.

9. INDUSTRY & BEST PRACTICE EXPERTISE

The services organizations of commercial Software Monetization companies have extensive industry experience with many customers in different markets (with many different business processes and back-office systems). They understand what licensing and pricing models are more effective in different customer segments and how to most efficiently deploy those models in an operationally efficient way.

These providers can provide valuable input on a variety of Software Monetization best practices in areas like:• Maintenance• Product pricing• Product structure• Product packaging optimization

• Product lifecycle management

• Channel models• Business processes• High-availability systems

10. RISK REDUCTION

Ultimately, there is a large investment that is going to be made over time in a Software Monetization solution. This investment affects all aspects of the organization and the capability to “get it right” across so many stakeholders is difficult and not typically within the realm of most companies.

Leading firms like Flexera Software have successful records of achieving results - why wouldn’t you partner with a market leader?

Flexera Software helps application producers and enterprises manage application usage and increase the value they derive from their software. Our next-generation software licensing, compliance, security and installation solutions are essential to ensure continuous licensing compliance, optimize software investments and future-proof businesses against the risks and costs of constantly changing technology.

A marketplace leader for more than 25 years, 80,000+ customers turn to Flexera Software as a trusted and neutral source of knowledge and expertise, and for the automation and intelligence designed into our products. For more information, please go to: www.flexerasoftware.com.

ABOUT FLEXERA SOFTWARE