The idea of building a commercial software licensing product began after the founder had implemented a number of simple “”roll your own”” licensing solutions in order to license protect software products over the course of a number of software engineering jobs. As new licensing scenarios and security vulnerabilities were identified, the implementations mushroomed into a significant software development effort, and the opportunity for a “”cheaper faster better”” commercial license management product was thus identified.

Agilis Software was launched in September 2002 as a self-funded lean startup, concurrent with our first product launch: EasyLicenser, an easy-to-use and low-cost license key based license manager product that was at the same time versatile and secure. We achieved our first sale within six weeks of product launch over the Internet, and over the next few years we accumulated a significant worldwide customer base.

We inferred from customer feedback that whereas a license key based system such as EasyLicenser addressed many important licensing requirements, what was really needed was a frictionless licensing system that offered a higher level of flexibility and “trust but verify” non-intrusiveness. Cloud systems and enterprise software imposed additional requirements. In response, we developed the versatile Internet protocol based Orion network licensing platform. In each and every category of functionality, we engineered Orion to provide clear and compelling business benefit differentiators over equivalent competitors’ offerings.

As we marketed Orion, we felt it would be beneficial to offer our Orion customers a license server hosting option, in order to eliminate the uptime risk and infrastructure, setup and operations costs associated with operating a server. To address this need, we engineered Orion for multi-tenancy, and offered it as part of our Acropolis hosting service.

By this time, we had shifted to an OEM sales model, and our licensing solutions, while priced appropriately for their level of functionality, were affordable primarily to established companies. What smaller companies (especially lean startups with unproven business models or a track record of success in the marketplace) needed was a way to manage payment terms as well as risk capital outlay, and a way to scale as their business grew – all without compromising licensing capabilities. In response, we have engineered Orion as well as our website and business processes to deliver the new Nephele cloud-based monthly license subscription service with tiered monthly subscription pricing.