What can Orion do for us that competing licensing solutions cannot do, and under what circumstances do these capabilities matter?

Orion enables you to go where it was formerly not possible to do so, with important business implications. Here are just a few examples:

1. Internet-hosted floating licensing. You can offer your enterprise customers floating licenses over the Internet, even from behind firewalls and over slow / unreliable networks. This capability yields two important benefits:
   • Reduced operations cost. It completely eliminates the operational logistics to you of redistributing a license server to your end customer environment, providing support for such redistributed server installations, and distributing floating license keys to your enterprise end customers. It also eliminates the operational logistics to your enterprise end customers of installing and operating a license server, installing floating license keys, etc. At the same time, you can delegate day-to-day administration of the floating license pools to the respective end customers’ administrators and control their privileges.
   • Visibility into your product usage. Your end customers’ licensing activities are recorded in a central audit trail that you can use to run business intelligence reports and conduct audits. Reports may be run across all your customers’ licenses in order to obtain a bigger picture of your product usage, for example to discern trends, identify product feature usage for product planning purposes, and facilitate sales forecasting.
2. Enterprise license pools. For enterprise customers that purchase a pool of fixed (as opposed to floating) licenses, you can make the pool available to their administrator and let the administrator manage their licenses within the overall constraints of the pool parameters in self-service mode. The administrator may choose to allow any user within the enterprise to activate their license, or register specific users that are authorized to activate a license. The end users obtain their license through automatic, non-intrusive product activation when they can connect to the license server, and through self-service offline product activation when disconnected. End users can also return and / or relocate their licenses in a secure and non-intrusive manner. In either case, it is not necessary for your operations team to register one license per end user in the enterprise – you define a single pool-level license. You can accomplish this regardless of whether you host the license over the Internet or redistribute the Orion server to your end customer. All this is possible because of Orion’s underlying anonymous-user product activation and license relocation features. Two important benefits result from this capability:
   • Reduced operations cost. Operations costs are lowered for you because your operations team issues a single license for the entire pool. Your end customer also benefits from the lowered operations cost associated with issuing individual licenses, because their end users can autonomously obtain and return individual licenses in a non-intrusive manner. When you offer enterprise pool licensing over the Internet, both you and your enterprise customer benefit from elimination of the overhead of redistributing and supporting a license server installation.
   • Improved enterprise customer experience. The end users of the enterprise are not inconvenienced by software licensing consideration (they don’t see “license keys”, and they can move licenses among machines without having to go to their administrator), and the enterprise administrator is likewise not burdened with the administrative overhead of having to register a license for each and every end user or to reshuffle the allocation of licenses unless and to the extent that such control is desired.
3. Scalable, multi-modal licensing over the Internet and wide area networks. The Orion server’s communication protocol is based on HTTP, and supports communication through firewalls, HTTP proxy servers and DMZs (demilitarized zones). The protocol is stateless, as license state is securely persisted at both ends: unlike all competing floating license servers, there are no heartbeats between the application and the license server when functioning as a floating license server, and both the application and license server are not required to be simultaneously running for the purpose of keeping each other honest. The license server is architected for scalability from the ground up, and can support millions of concurrently active licenses per license database on average hardware. The same license server can simultaneously support multiple license models such as named-user licensing and floating licensing. Individual licenses can be locked to remote machines for minimum time periods if desired, to reduce sharing of licenses. Taken together, this enables you to achieve the following improvements to your business models and processes:
   • Effective monetization of cloud services through licensing technology. As a cloud service provider, you can monetize your services more effectively, because (a) you can utilize commercial licensing technology that scales with your user population, (b) you can reach new customer segments by offering alternate pricing models such as utility pricing and software rentals, and by not having to define minimum-user-limit subscriptions (a quirk that is ordinarily driven by the inability to control sharing of user licenses in small-business environments), and (c) you can charge differently based on the value of the remote device that is used to access your cloud service (for example, a tablet could be be charged differently from a smartphone, and a Mac or PC can be charged differently from a Chromebook).
   • Licensing of cloud services to both individual users and enterprise customers from the same service. As a cloud service provider, you no longer have to support two distributions of your product: a cloud service for individual users, and a redistributed product for your enterprise customers (made worse when you also redistribute a floating license server with your product).
   • Reduced cost of operations for global enterprise licensing. When your global enterprise customer requires that you redistribute the Orion server to their premises rather than access it over the Internet, you customer does not have to host an Orion server instance on each separate local area network, and you do not have to issue multiple sets of floating licenses. A single central license server installed at your enterprise customer’s primary data center can manage licenses globally or on a per-site basis, and your enterprise customer’s administrator can autonomously manage and adjust sub-pools of licenses for individual sites or user groups without your involvement.
4. Comprehensive embedded system platform support. Orion has available an ANSI C/C++ based “porting SDK” for its C/C++ client library for rapid portability to a wide range of platforms, including embedded system platforms, that fall outside the already-comprehensive list of standard C/C++ platforms that are supported out-of-the-box. Under the porting program, the Orion client library has been successfully ported to esoteric platforms such as VxWorks, raw flash memory hardware, and embedded Linux in a very short amount of time and for a modest fee.
5. Unified solution with single application integration. A single application integration with the Orion client library is sufficient to accommodate a wide range of licensing models such as floating licensing and product activation. That is, it is not necessary to perform a separate integration (and issue a separate product edition) for individual licensing models. The benefits to you as an ISV that sells your product with multiple pricing models are:
   • Reduced engineering cost and complexity resulting from a single source code base.
   • Reduced deployment and operations cost and complexity resulting from a single binary distribution. The licensing mode for the common binary is driven by the license and its configuration parameters, so for example an end customer who purchases a single-user license can update to a floating license simply by purchasing and obtaining a new license without having to download and reinstall a new product version.
6. Sophisticated real-time alerts and monitors. The Orion server can be configured with a set of rules that you define in order to have designated individuals or systems receive alerts in real time for licensing and administration events of interest on object of interest. If the built-in email alerts are insufficient, you have to define and install custom event handler plug-ins into the Orion server. The benefits of the event alerter and monitoring capabilities are far-reaching. Here are just a few examples:
   • Proactive sales opportunity management. Your sales representatives (in addition to your customers themselves) can receive early-warning alerts for expiring licenses, as well as licenses approaching concurrent-license limits, both in real time and according to a monitoring schedule that you define.
   • Outbound back office integration with CRM, ERP and billing systems. Events occurring in the license server in response to daily usage can push pertinent data to back office systems. For example, a manual addition of a license to the server can synchronize a CRM system’s record of user licenses, or a billing system can record hourly rental metered usage for the purposes of computing a utility bill, or your CRM system can receive user registration information from your customers as they activate their licenses.
   • Security early warning alerts. An administrator can be alerted to failed authentication attempts and other security breaches in real time.
7. Complex license configurations. Complex pricing models are realized without having to code for them: at the time of license generation, you can directly configure the complex licensing policy under a single license, and at the time of license activation, the single license is activated. The Orion server manages the complexity and atomicity of the entire set of licenses, whether these are a combination of named user licenses and / or multiple floating licenses, each with individual licensing policies.
8. Futureproof. In addition to packing capabilities such as the above that are often beyond those that may initially be required but could be useful over time, extensibility is in Orion’s DNA: license record structures are extensible, Orion’s server functionality is extensible via server-side plug-ins, and Orion’s high-level client library is extensible.
9. Growth-friendly pricing for startup and small business ISVs (with Nephele subscription service). An ISV startup with an unproven business model and limited funding can begin with a Nephele starter subscription on a monthly subscription basis with no minimum commitment term, seamlessly grow through the various Nephele subscription tiers while retaining the benefits of monthly subscription, and then transition to an annual subscription Orion OEM license after sales have matured. Throughout the entire lifecycle, there is no change to the application or back office integration with Orion, or disruption to operations personnel or to existing customers.