Software Monetization

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Opsview Uses Software Monetization to Improve Customer Experience and Operational Efficiency

October 08, 2012

When we are kids, we rely quite a bit on trust. We trust our friends to take care of the toys we lend them, we trust adults to act fairly and we trust that people won’t take advantage of us. This system works pretty well for children, it starts to fall apart in the business world. Opsview, an IT monitoring company, learned the hard way that a trust-based license model simply does not work, and the company decided to transition to a more flexible, enforceable software monetization and licensing model in order to generate and protect revenue.

Rob May, head of service delivery at Opsview, spoke about his company’s journey at SafeNet’s (News - Alert) Licensing Live US 2012 event. May explained the state of the company 12 months ago. It had a strong product but it was only one homogeneous offering, undifferentiated for different market sectors. Furthermore, it was completely open source, and therefore had no protection. Also, the company used a cumbersome manual fulfillment process and relied completely on trust-based licensing. All of this made revenue generation quite difficult.

The company found that its one-size-fits-all product line really fit no one. It faced other problems as well, including a limited ability to provide trials of the product, no compelling event to drive a buying decision, delayed revenue collection for renewals and customers who were using more copies of the software than they’d purchased. Opsview realized it needed to take a journey to improve its software monetization strategy. The company set goals of improving the customer experience by reducing fulfillment time, extending deployment options and implementing self-service for its small- and medium- enterprise product; protecting its revenue by creating a compelling event for customer renewal and enforcing feature locking; and improving its product offerings by moving away from a one-size-fits-all model and creating differentiated products.

To mark this journey, May stated that Opsview was looking for four success factors. They had to select the correct licensing solution. The company considered building its own solution but in the end opted for the SafeNet solution instead. SafeNet offered a multi-platform solution that offered ease of integration, and SafeNet was a company that Opsview could work with easily. SafeNet helped Opsview create a product launch strategy, bundling the licensing introduction into a new release that sported new features. The new product would offer end-to-end integration, connecting the Opsview Web store with Salesforce.com (News - Alert), the company’s finance system and the SafeNet entitlement management system. The two companies also worked together to create a communications plan that targeted existing customers, the open source community and the market of potential customers.

May stated that the implementation was quite smooth. Now, a customer goes to the Opsview website, signs up for the product, and his or her info is sent to Salesforce.com. The info is also fed into the finance system. Salesfore generates the entitlement along with the SafeNet EMS, and the entitlement goes to the customer. It’s as easy as that.

Opsview has seen many benefits from this implementation. The new system has improved the customer experience. Fulfillment time has gone from days to minutes, and customers now have choices in the type of deployment. Customer-facing staff members also have an up-to-date view of customer usage. The solution also helps maximize revenue by allowing for better targeting of features, trials to drive sales and a new version of the product targeted to SMEs. The result is a 55 percent increase in sales, which is a clear and present return on investment.

Edited by Brooke Neuman

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