Featured Article from Software Licensing

For applications producers, software monetization is a critical aspect of capitalizing on next-gen opportunities like the Internet of Things (IoT), network function virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and more. For Richard Jenny, director of program management and DevOps at Adva Optical Networks (formerly Overture Networks (News - Alert)), it’s the key to becoming a digital powerhouse.

For those that sell software, optimization boosts new and recurring revenue through flexible software licensing, activation, software delivery and full lifecycle management of customer usage rights. In turn, that enables rapid adoption of new business models for on-premises, cloud, embedded and mobile applications, with a reduction in operational costs and complexities.

As Adva transforms from a hardware-focused company to a hardware and software solutions vendor, it needed a methodology to deliver virtual network functions and software in a way that can be controlled, monetized and understood, according to Jenny.

“We are evolving from having solely a legacy hardware-based business to a next-generation, IoT management, orchestration and service assurance business based on software defined networks and NFV,” Jenny said. “Can we provide easy entry options [for customers], do we have scalability? And does this have to be tied to a unique piece of hardware? No, it doesn’t. We see a role as a pure-play in the virtualization world, making our products work on generic hardware.”

To support that sea change, Adva turned to Flexera Software to provide a third-party solution for software optimization and license management.

“We needed to get more into software licensing formally,” he said in a video interview. “We were in the middle of introducing next-gen products, and had four products in the infancy stage. We can’t afford our core talent working on recreating licensing solutions. It didn’t makes sense for us as a lean company leveraging every software resource we have to build feature capacity to invest those treasured resources into creating end-to-end license management, when other companies already can do that and are good at that.”

He added, “This is an endorsement of licensing, and it provided us a path to sell software in many different ways.”