What are some key pain points that companies adopting licensing technologies have faced / are facing?

• Lost sales due to intrusiveness to the end customer. There have been well-publicized cases of commodity software vendors dropping licensing technology and never considering its use again because its intrusiveness to end customers backfired and adversely impacted sales to a greater extent than revenue loss due to piracy. In particular, customers should not be unduly restricted from effortlessly and autonomously moving their licenses among machines, particularly when using multiple devices or upgrading hardware, nor should they be required to go through complex procedures to obtain a new license after a minor hardware repair.
• Lost revenue due to ineffective copy protection. Many licensing systems, particularly legacy and home-grown “license key” based systems, are easy to hack. In many instances, the hacks are publicized over the Internet. The more secure solutions typically require expensive and inflexible hardware dongles.
• Increased operations costs due to lack of manageability for the vendor. Home-grown license key based systems typically limit their functionality to encryption and runtime validation – features such as automatic node locking, managing licenses in a database and providing simple order fulfillment, tracking, auditing and reporting facilities are typically not developed. Commercial license key based systems that do provide these capabilities are nonetheless not quite geared up for scenarios such as securely processing returns or helping customers relocate their licenses or recover them from crashed machines.
• Increased operations costs to enterprise customers due to lack of visibility into licensed usage within an enterprise. An enterprise that wishes to enforce compliance of licensed usage of a vendor’s product typically resorts to expensive manual procedures and often purchases an additional, manually-maintained, software asset tracking system to assist them with this task. This information should really be automatically maintained in an easily-accessible format in the license database itself.