The Path to Elastic Licensing

Software licensing is a large domain encompassing a lot of aspects – technical, legal, economical, etc. – pertaining to the relationship binding vendors and users. It is a complex practice. If you look at it from the independent software vendors’ (ISV) viewpoint, it represents the process by which they monetize the capabilities of their products. From the software users’ perspective, it represents an important and growing cost factor in their businesses.

Currently, we already have quite a few software licensing models: per user, per system, perpetual, by subscription, per concurrent user, etc. The key question is: “Do we really need yet another one?”

This white paper explores the changing software market as it has gradually evolved away from the traditional licensing models toward the increasingly popular flexible models. There are many factors involved in this market shift and this white paper will delve into those factors as well as present an introduction to Elastic Licensing. As an alternative method to Pay-Per-Use, Elastic Licensing has distinct benefits for both the software vendors and users, while being fully complimentary to existing systems.