But can Orion support a traditional product activation paradigm?

In essence, yes, and with added benefits. There are however two fundamental differences, both of which stem from Orion’s philosophy and can (against our recommendation) be overridden with a little customization by you:

• The auto-generated license activation record is long, and can range anywhere from a few hundred bytes to tens of kilobytes depending on the volume of information content. When performing offline activation, this information cannot be relayed over the phone and manually typed in – the offline activation is necessarily file based. This is due to the extensive licensing content that is stored in the activation record and gives Orion its high level of licensing capabilities. Even if the content could be shrunk to a smaller size, manually communicating and typing in anything more than a few characters is error-prone and therefore increases the cost of operations.
• Similarly, the auto-generated fingerprint used for obtaining an offline license can be long (especially when our machine fingerprinting technology is used for node locking) and necessitates a file-based transfer.

Therefore telephone and IVR based offline activation mechanisms are not supported out-of-the-box, unlike some competing solutions.