Build or Buy Series

10 REASONS
Why You Should Leverage
a Commercial Software
Monetization Solution

BUILD

BUY

Software Monetization is the key to maximizing the

value of and revenue from your valuable IP but how
will you do it?
Unless you have unlimited resources time, money
and people and can afford to shift your focus off
your core competencies youll want to leverage a
commercial, off-the-shelf Software Monetization
solution.
HERE ARE 10 REASONS WHY.

1. FUTURE-PROOFING FOR MARKET

ADVANTAGE

Commercial Software Monetization solutions those that are

readily available in the market place, not internally built or
homegrown - will ALWAYS have more functionality, more
associated best practices, and more industry use cases,
allowing you to design a solution that will meet your needs
today and in the future.
Further, a commercial solution
provides product agility like
being able to proactively change
product packaging, software
licensing models and pricing to
take advantage of market
opportunities.

FYI
Companies that need to
offer new license models
frequently, and who build
competitive differentiation
with licensing and pricing
models, rely on
commercial offerings.

2. FASTER TIME-TO-BENEFIT

Commercial solutions are ready to go and have many

associated best-practices and implementation use cases
for a variety of processes, license models, and customerfacing interfaces associated with Software Monetization.
Unlike internally built solutions, the deployment of a
commercial solution doesnt suffer from things like
endless internal development cycles to define and
refine requirements for systems and processes that most
companies dont fully understand.

3. TUNED TO THE SOFTWARE

BUSINESS
Commercial solutions provide effective
support for the software product
lifecycle the morphing of products over
time due to upgrades, updates, transfers,
end-of-life, mergers & acquisitions and
more.
Producers that use internally-developed
systems tend to lose track of their
customer entitlements over the lifecycle
of their products, resulting in lost
renewal or upgrade revenue, manual
processes, and ultimately, customer
dissatisfaction.
Hardware companies that are monetizing
the software on their devices need to be
particularly in-tune with the ability to
manage their digital assets as software
has very different characteristics than
physical assets.

4. CORE COMPETENCY
FOCUS

Companies shouldnt use their best product and IT

development resources investing in the development
of licensing technology and entitlement management
platforms.
They should use their top talent to focus on the
development of market-leading products in their
areas of core competency.

CORE
COMPETENCY

5. BUSINESS SCALABILITY

Companies that buy a commercial Software Monetization

solution tend to standardize on that solution across their
range of product offerings and business processes, lowering
operational and development costs via reusable and
standard components while eliminating manual processes.

WARNING!
Companies that build solutions tend to continually expand
their software monetization requirements as they acquire new
companies, never standardizing on a single approach, as
each approach is tuned to a particular software title.

This lack of a standard solution

typically results in a poor
customer experience as endusers are faced with different
use experiences and an inability
to easily access their respective
entitlements.

6. LIFECYCLE PRODUCTIVITY

Over time, resources once applied to the development of

homegrown licensing and entitlement management
capabilities tend to move on to other projects, and it
becomes increasingly difficult to find resources to
manage changes to a Software Monetization solution that
is required to remain competitive in the market.
As a result, solutions cannot grow to meet the needs of an
evolving market, typically leading to higher internal
support costs, and possibly affecting the product side
with increased discounts and erosion of market position as
companies cant easily adjust to what the market needs.

7. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Commercial Software Monetization solutions have a breadth of

usage reporting and compliance management capabilities that
bring value to customers in the form of more effective license
management, chargeback, workflow analysis, and the
ability to control access to users on an as-needed basis.
These capabilities are rarely, if ever available with an internally
developed system.
Further, these commercial solutions also have out-of-the-box
customer-facing portals that enable 24 x 7 self-service to
perform a number of administrative and compliance tasks so
that customers can get access to what they need when they
need it, eliminating bottlenecks.

8. INCREASED REVENUE FROM

ENTERPRISE AGREEMENTS
Commercial solutions provide usage reporting capabilities to
enable software producers to optimize enterprise-level
agreements for their largest customers based upon a mutually
agreed usage and pricing formula.
Its not uncommon for many software producers to obtain 50% or
more of their revenue from a handful of accounts who have
special, non-standard enterprise agreements.

PITFALLS
The inability to gather accurate
usage information often results in
software producers missing the
opportunity to gather upside
revenue that is built into the
agreement because there is a lack
of factual information.
More importantly, the availability of
these capabilities enable software
producers to pro-actively construct
enterprise-level agreements that
make it easier for their largest
customers to consume large
amounts of software.

9. INDUSTRY & BEST PRACTICE

EXPERTISE
The services organizations of commercial Software Monetization
companies have extensive industry experience with many
customers in different markets (with many different business
processes and back-office systems). They understand what
licensing and pricing models are more effective in different
customer segments and how to most efficiently deploy those
models in an operationally efficient way.
These providers can provide valuable input on a variety of
Software Monetization best practices in areas like:
Product lifecycle
Maintenance
management
Product pricing
Channel models
Product structure
Product packaging optimization Business processes
High-availability systems

10. RISK REDUCTION

Ultimately, there is a large investment that is going to be

made over time in a Software Monetization solution. This
investment affects all aspects of the organization and the
capability to get it right across so many stakeholders is
difficult and not typically within the realm of most
companies.
Leading firms like Flexera Software have successful records
of achieving results - why wouldnt you partner with a
market leader?

ABOUT FLEXERA SOFTWARE

Flexera Software helps application producers and enterprises
manage application usage and increase the value they derive
from their software. Our next-generation software licensing,
compliance, security and installation solutions are essential to
ensure continuous licensing compliance, optimize software
investments and future-proof businesses against the risks and
costs of constantly changing technology.
A marketplace leader for more than 25 years, 80,000+
customers turn to Flexera Software as a trusted and neutral
source of knowledge and expertise, and for the automation
and intelligence designed into our products. For more
information, please go to: www.flexerasoftware.com.