End-to-End Software License Management

Sammanfattning: As the software is constantly evolving, licensing choices in complex business environments are becoming more and more sophisticated, since licenses are used to govern software costs, access, and responsibilities. With the right licensing model in place and efficiently utilized licensing flow, organizations are able to ensure that the software is being used according to the licensing agreement which can strongly influence the return on software investment. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate what the process looks like when dealing with licenses that are tailored for a huge and complex software products, focusing on identifying improvement areas and proposing possible solutions in order to improve the license management in general. To achieve defined objective, this research has conducted a case study and qualitative comparison combining both published research and a real business context by performing sixteen interviews in two companies. Some of the main results of the investigation are: (i) license management is affected by the complete software end–to-end flow and such needs to be controlled by providing automated mechanisms for managing licenses through lifecycle changes, starting from the order step, through activation, upgrade, return, etc, (ii) centralized entitlement management (licensing server) should be established with shared and consistent view between all integrated systems to ease the process of tracking of all customer entitlements in one place,(iii) the license key files should not be delivered manually (via email) and in general, manual keys are the bottlenecks in the automated flow, (iv) contracts should be standardized in the first place to avoid manual translations from the customer purchase order into the sales order, (v) blockchain can be considered as a future trend towards software license management in various use cases (vi) usage-based and subscription-based licensing models are becoming more and more popular. The conclusions drawn from this study together with the presented results can help the research community to identify key strategies when exploring license management, but we believe it is also a good starting point to reveal possible directions for future research in this field as well.