Once You Go Cloud – You Never Go Back!

The Challenge

New River Kinematics, part of the Hexagon AB family of companies, specializes in high-end “Spatial Analyzer” metrology software that allows their customers to plan out and execute complex part assemblies.

David O’Neal, Product Line Director at New River Kinematics, explains: “Metrology is the science of measurement. Any large complex product such as a plane, train, ship, or satellite is comprised of hundreds if not thousands of parts from different vendors across many different locations. Consider the challenge of assembling an aircraft where the fuselage may be made by one manufacturer, the wings by another and so forth. Each part is manufactured according to specific tolerances, and then all the parts must come together to be assembled into the final product. Spatial Analyzer helps customers ensure that the tolerances of the individual components comply with what is required so that the parts don’t interfere with each other as they come together”

NRK’s software is often used out in the field on job sites, and initially the company used SafeNet’s hardware dongles to manage the licensing of the product, which led to a number of issues for both NRK and their customers. “Our software is quite expensive.” explains David. “We’d have customers say they had lost the dongle and needed a replacement, expecting not to have to pay for another license – but of course you can’t prove that the old dongle is no longer in operation. In general, dealing with physical dongles gives rise to a lot of problems.”

To address these concerns, New River Kinematics actively looked for a better licensing approach, with the following requirements:

• Cloud-based, to avoid the problems of physical dongles and for ease of use.
• The ability to easily and reliably move licenses from one machine to another.
• Ability to easily manage Trials.
• Easy integration with Salesforce.

Why Nalpeiron?

David’s team found Nalpeiron especially appealing for three reasons:

1. Nalpeiron’s cloud-based licensing solution made it possible to move everything online — allowing them to say goodbye to dongles and awkward customer moments.
2. The opportunity to take Nalpeiron for a test drive via a 30-day free trial, which gave them the confidence that it worked as promised.
3. Easy and straight-forward implementation allowing them to get up and running quickly.

“When we saw Nalpeiron’s cloud-based licensing platform, we knew it was the future.  It was great to be able to actually try it out as part of the evaluation process,” says David. “Our engineers were amazed at how easy it was to implement and we had something up and running in a day. We were impressed.”

The Results

“It’s great to be able to always see which licenses are active and where – and if we see anything nefarious we can shut it down remotely – it really helps us protect our IP. Cloud licensing gives us a lot of additional security and a lot more control than anything else we’ve ever had. You just sell it, put it out there and it can be used in any way, shape, or form – even at sites that have no Internet connectivity.  Now that we have seen the advantages of the cloud-based approach, we could never go back,” David comments.

Conclusion

"For any large software company that prizes the value of what they are making, Nalpeiron is the best way of ensuring the security of their software – and for a large company, that’s really important. We’ve come a long way from our dongle days. With Nalpeiron, we can finally stop stressing over licensing issues and focus on what we do best: building great software.”