Software Licensing Featured Articles

Software Licensing Company Flexera Outlines Successful Entitlement Management Program Characteristics

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Flexera Software blogger Michael Smith (News - Alert) recently posted some thoughts on what characteristics are shared by successful entitlement management programs.

He defines an Entitlement Management Program as “completely separate from any existing ERP or CRM system,” since those are dedicated to financial and customer driven responsibilities, while entitlement management for licensing “should be a hub of all operational activities and license-based business process.”

In other words, Smith contends, entitlement management should be operational model driven – “driven by means of several business drivers that encourage new revenue models, streamline operational costs and improve the customer experience.” Hard to argue with those priorities, or with the fact that those need to come before business level process can be developed in such  areas as revenue based entitlements, non-revenue entitlements, entitlement administration, license fulfillment process, license lifecycle and others.

Smith talks of an entitlement hub, “the container in which one can pour their business hopes and dreams to maintain a competitive edge.” This hub defines the business level interfaces for the operational model to function, Smith says, adding that it’s “service oriented architecture broken into several distinct modules that control the functionality required for each of the operational model categories.”  

Get the modules and business level interfaces defined first, then, Smith says, turn your attention to finding a premier entitlement management and license fulfillment engine such as FlexNet Operations, to “maintain a system of record of entitlement and license fulfillment data.”

Successful initiatives also have a way to allow license fulfillment of legacy or homegrown license technologies, Smith said, noting that “the ease of being able to add new license platforms and new integrations to external systems through well-defined business level data contract will result in a sophisticated merger and acquisition platform.” You also need a self-service portal built on top of the entitlement hub ideology to give customers “a place where they can self-manage their licenses and entitlements.”

Don’t limit the self-service portal just to customers, either, since internal users can also benefit from a dedicated self-service portal, as Smith points out.  

In other company news, Raynet GmbH, an IT Specialist with a successful track record of more than 10 years in system and software management with an emphasis on services around software packaging and software virtualization, has joined Flexera Software's Application Readiness Alliance Partner Program as a reseller and managed service provider. Flexera is a leading provider of software licensing solutions.