Featured Article from Software Licensing

As companies have begun to move their entire operations to the cloud, they have also realized the potential of outsourcing their computing capability for intensive tasks such as rendering images or video. Television companies, architects, artist, engineers, and similar individuals and companies in such fields who seek out these services may have found “render farms” from their computing service providers of choice.

One such render farm provider, Thinkbox, has been clawing its way to the top of the industry by offering new data processing features, but this is not the only way to make it to the top. Thinkbox recently announced that it has partnered with Flexera Software to handle usage-based licensing for the Thinkbox Deadline rendering toolkit. Previously, users could only subscribe to perpetual licenses that applied to a set number of devices.

Chris Bond, the CEO of Thinkbox, called this development important for customers that want to scale up or down their rendering use at a moment’s notice.

“Usage-based licensing is a game changer,” Bond said. “The freedom to spin up cloud-based instances has been hugely beneficial for our customers and providing per-minute access to integral workflow tools takes that flexibility a step further, providing a streamlined avenue for scaling up on-premise or cloud-based render farms during peak activity periods.”

The partnership between these vendors will have ability to heighten the importance of usage-based access for Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure customers. Although Deadline works in Linux, OS X, and Windows, the same customers who use those operating systems may have a preference for Azure as their preferred cloud infrastructure. In the past, these customers may have used their perpetual licenses on a set number of physical machines in the office or virtual machines in the cloud. What usage-based licensing brings is the ability for them to build new virtual machines in Azure whenever they need.

Azure has shown growth in the past year by finding a number of big-name customers such as Alaska Airlines and Jet.com. It can also speak to small businesses because of its ability to sync with various third-party applications.

For all the image and video processing companies in the world, whether they are large or small, the expansion of licensing types for Thinkbox can help them achieve their goals while keeping their intellectual property protected and their finances in check. They can create new render farms without worrying about violating licensing agreements – the licenses work with the needs of its clients – which should free them to create better projects that are not limited by the licenses they purchased ahead of time.