What we've learned so far..
We’re just finishing up our SP1 push and it should be out soon. I do have ton of activity to catch you all up on since I last blogged. You could probably figure this out from the silence. This particular blog will have an external focus – because it’s mostly about you and your reception to the product. We took a team to Barcelona, Spain for the European launch of SLPs. Tech Ed had over 4,000 attendees. We spoke to many of them in our 4 booths.
We had the chance to provide interactive demos, answer some very good questions – technical and non-technical, hand out lots of cool items, and meet very interesting people doing very interesting things. As a program manager in a product group, there is almost nothing more critical to my success than having the experience of being in the same space as you, the customer.
Some of you came to Tech Ed looking for answers to some hard technical challenges you are facing. Some of you came merely to find out what the next big thing is. What I found rewarding was some of you were really glad we were there. You had a mission to get some information about some aspect of our product.
At least a few dozen of you said that having some form of product activation or code protection was one of those things you were on the lookout for. I’m hoping that everyone that needed answers from us was able to find us and get information to take back to their colleagues and management teams.
The question I am hoping you are asking yourself is, ‘How many of those customers could meet their objective with SLPs today?’
Surprisingly, many of you found that we have enough features and functionality in our current offering to get you well on your way to meeting your requirements. This is not always the case with Microsoft 1.0 products as we are all aware of. This was no mistake on our part, but it also wasn’t a cakewalk either.
The next question I imagine you are asking might be, “Should I be looking more carefully at SLPs?” or…. “Am I missing something here?”
I’ll attempt to answer this question by group-profiling the set of customers that indicated SLPs was a viable solution for addressing their software activation requirements. The way I intend to do this is recalling the conversations I had with customers where they had already thought about what they needed and we simply said: “Yes” we can do that today.”
Here are the profiles:
If you are a software publisher (large or small) today and need a tried and tested means for distributing your product to the mass-market as a trial version – Tech Ed attendees confirm, SLPs has this one nailed.
If you are a software publisher (large or small) today and you need to know how many customers are using your software in-the-wild – Tech Ed attendees confirm, SLPs has this one nailed.
If you are a software publisher (large or small) today and you need a trustworthy mechanism to turn those trial users into more committed users (like get paid for your software!) – Tech Ed attendees confirm, SLPs has this one nailed.
If you are involved in an enterprise development team and you require the benefits of SLPs activation *(activation-explained later) – Tech Ed attendees confirm, SLPs has this one nailed.
If you are involved in enterprise development and you’d like to get detailed feature usage about your deployed applications – Tech Ed attendees confirm, SLPs has this one nailed.
For each of the above scenarios (and certain combinations of these scenarios), we were pleased to find that we can meet your expectations.
There were many more of you that were brave enough to come to our booth and ask, “What do you do?” I group these into three categories:
· Those that had some interest in ‘licensing’ or code protection
· Those that wanted the free stuff we were handing out and were just being polite
· Those that really wanted to hear if they were ‘missing’ something
With the exception of the middle category above, we couldn’t jump right into what our technology can do for them without understanding something about their business. Like most technical people (and I consider myself one) we tend to jump right into the technology because that’s where we feel most comfortable and empowered. But on the surface, SLPs is less about technology than it is about business.
Licensing is not a technical problem. Activation is not a technical problem. Feature usage is not a technical problem. Each one of them is a solution having roots in the business of software.
It comes down to this, SLPs can be a major component in your quest to have more control over your software business, but it is up to you to establish what your business problem is.
Here are the top takeaways from Teched and several other customer events regarding the business need software publishers and development teams have:
· True Up. This one is at the top of the stack. True Up (though not always called this) is the ability for two parties to agree that software usage falls on one side or the other of target. Mostly this is the recognition that a customer of an ISV is using more product than the contract allowed for. Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to in the context of ‘True-Up’ have confirmed that customers will compensate their vendors for this inconsistency (True-Up).
· Cost Justification. Producing software is a costly endeavor. ROI at a macro-level is no longer sufficient for budget planning. Executives are demanding more qualified and quantifiable metrics for costs associated with the lifecycle of a software product.
· Trial Conversion. For those that publish commercial software for the masses, getting a trial into a potential customer’s hands is a huge challenge. Making sure that the customer has every opportunity to evaluate what you have to offer is part of this challenge. In the end, you want to motivate customers to make a purchase decision.
· Enforcement. Simply put, this is the implementation of controls that will prevent or restrict the usage of software features/functionality based upon some formula or criteria. This dynamic has the most potential to become extremely complex very quickly. Some enforcement models I have heard require no less than a Visio diagram to communicate. Others like ‘Copy Protection’ are far simpler to describe. However, even this can get complex.
· Enablement. Enablement is the term we are using for business models that are beginning to emerge. This is quickly gaining momentum. One example of enablement is the ‘pay for use’ concept. This addresses many of the shortcomings that some of the enforcement models promote.
In my next blog, I’ll begin to go deeper into each one of these areas and attempt to drive some clarity into the business needs that might suggest an implementation to lean one way or the other. I’ll do this by sharing some real-life scenarios with you. * And I'll go into some depth on activation.
Terrence Nevins – (for the entire team)
