In the days when Avistar offered a proprietary hardware based system they protected their software with a solution which had been built in house. The software activation process under this system was a little “clunky” for the end user, and the copy protection worked on an “honour” basis.

Moving forward into a software-only environment Avistar’s product development team were clear that they needed:

• Iron-clad copy protection
• A licensing solution embedded within the software, which would deliver a seamless end-user activation experience.
• Ease of deployment

With the in-house development team working flat out on the new software product it was clear that even attempting to develop the existing “in-house” licensing system was not going to be an option. Avistar also recognised that now their whole business was to be based around their software offering they needed to draw on the experience of licensing experts to give their software the protection and licensing professionalism it deserved.

Avistar went to the market and shortlisted 3 software solutions vendors. After a thorough testing and procurement process the Nalpeiron Licensing solution was selected.

There were 3 main criteria on which potential providers were assessed:

1. Functionality: the Nalpeiron system offered ease of deployment for Avistar’s engineers, bullet-proof copy-protection and a seamless end user experience.
2. Pricing: Nalpeiron offered value for money, with a clear usage based pricing model rather than the royalty based pricing model traditionally employed by the licensing industry.
3. Partner Compatibility: in seeking a software solutions provider Avistar were looking for a company who could provide a licensing solution that would work for them and for their strategic partner who operate a very different business model. The Nalpeiron System was a fit for the needs of both companies.

As a start up Linnsoft had developed their own copy protection. Bill Linn explains:

“Like many ISV’s in the early days we decided to develop our own solution. I have a Ph.D. in computer science, so I dusted off my cryptography books, picked the brains of a few ex-classmates who had gone on to specialize in the field and came up with a solution that was good enough for us at the time. Our software is an analysis tool and our customers will also have a subscription to a data service, with a unique password, so we piggy-backed our copy protection on to that password. This worked well enough for us for a time.”

Fighting Software Piracy

Linnsoft became aware that their software had been cracked by a pirate ring in Russia, where financial software is a key target.

“With pirated versions of our software available on the internet for a fraction of the cost of the genuine article we knew we needed stronger copy protection so we took the decision to lock the software to a physical machine.”

Moving on from the in house Licensing Solution.

Linnsoft quickly saw that attempting to develop their own licensing solutions to meet the new challenges would not be the best course of action:

“Our clients work in a very fast moving world. Our software helps them to make better trading decisions and for it to do that we have to remain focussed on constant development and improvement. Attempting to re-develop our own licensing solution would have been a distraction from our core business.”

Licensing Management for a Subscription Sales Model

Linnsoft were also moving away from selling lifetime licenses of their software, to a monthly subscription or SaaS sales model. This move proved to be a strong driver for sales as it created a far lower entry level price point for customers, allowed them to dip in and out of the service and also re-enforced the constantly developing nature of the software.

But from a licensing point of view the move to SaaS presented a whole new set of challenges. The in-house licensing system offered vey little control over license de-activation and re-activation around payment issues. In addition Linnsoft were looking for a solution which would integrate both easily and deeply with their own software, offered a low cost of entry, offered cross platform functionality and also worked for their sister company Market Delta.

They selected the Nalpeiron Licensing System.

Moving Forward with Nalpeiron

Linnsoft have been working with Nalpeiron for 3 years now and have the licensing solution fully integrated into their own software.

Bill Linn explains:

“NLS offers 100 modules, so there is something for pretty much every eventuality...”

Enhanced Copy Protection Drives Sales

With each software license locked to an individual machine Linnsoft’s product is now much more crack resistant.

But there have been added bonuses. Bill Linn explains:

“Many of our customers like to move their license between home and work machines. This is fine, but they need to remember to deactivate the license on their second machine before returning to work on the first. Many customers forget to do this, so we have introduced a supplementary license, for a nominal charge of $20 per month which saves customers from having to do the daily license shuffle

The annual revenue we now derive just from these additional licenses covers our NLS expenses many times over on an ongoing basis.

Before Nalpeiron we had no ability to control multiple machine usage by the same client, we are now extracting more revenue from customers who need multiple licenses.”

Managing Subscription Licensing

Running a monthly subscription SaaS sales model in a small business can be an administration nightmare. Using the Nalpeiron Licensing System Linnsoft are able to effectively manage subscriptions with minimal administrative intervention.

The system works by getting each licensed machine to check in monthly with Linnsoft’s own web server to validate that the account is in good standing and marking modules in the license if there is a payment problem. The application must momentarily internet deactivate the license before it checks in each month, reactivating the license when it gets an okay back from the server. Those users with a payment issue are flagged in the license itself. This triggers notification to the customer within the software and a daily check-in by the product until the billing issue is resolved.

If there is no resolution, Linnsoft mark the user as having cancelled on their web server database so the next daily check in will simply mark the license as INACTIVE. If the user later clears the problem, they can revise the license code back to active so the user can then activate it.

This system also revises the expiration date of the license to keep it at least 60 days out to avoid any built-in expiry so long as the client is billed successfully each month.

“The system has generally worked well for us, with maybe a 95% reliability factor. We have not had NLS server availability issues at all.”

In a similar way the system allows Linnsoft to get new customers up and running with the software before payment is received, keeping a daily check on the license to ensure that the account is paid up in good time.

Enhanced Customer Service

A few hours downtime can be a huge deal financially for one of Linnsoft’s trader clients. So the company are keen to do everything they can to keep their software operational. As a small business Linnsoft don’t operate 24/7 telephone tech support. So the client who finds himself “locked out” of his software for whatever reason, out of office hours could face big problems, with potentially significant financial repercussions, particularly if that client happens to be trading in a different time zone.

To alleviate this potential problem Linnsoft are looking in to using the license tracking and activation capabilities of the Nalpeiron Licensing System to give customers with accounts in good standing internet access to short term “emergency” license to get them over any temporary problems at times when they may not be able to access “human support.

As the business grew SoftCafe’s founder Scott Tyburski knew that they needed to put a more effective licensing system in place. In a software start-up situation sophisticated licensing solutions are generally the last thing on anyone’s mind. Business owners might buy a cheap wrapper solution or put something together themselves. As the business grows and developers start to realize that they need more sophisticated your copy protection.  There can be a tendency, for software developers, to want to write your own solution. 

Scott quickly realised the potential pitfalls of taking this route:

“Being a small software company, we did indeed consider writing our own piracy protection and hosting our own code database.  But we quickly realized that going this route would be a distraction from our core business.  The exercise would probably end up eating huge amounts of time, both in the initial development and the ongoing support. We would be “reinventing the wheel” and in all likelihood any solution we devised ourselves wouldn’t match up to what is already available on the market.”

So Softcafe set out to find a licensing solution.  After looking at a number of options they settled on Nalpeiron.

“We could see straight away that the service and support that Nalpeiron offers would easily be more efficient, less expensive, and most importantly, more reliable than anything we could come up with on our own.”

Dealing with high volume software sales to the catering industry, ease of use, for both themselves and their end users, was just as important to Softcafe as strong security.  They quickly saw that the Nalpeiron licensing solution offered both these benefits:

“The ease of integration, flexibility, and ironclad security of the Nalpeiron Licensing Service, compared with using cheap wrappers, became evident just days after testing it.”