License activation is a topic of interest for almost all software publishers today. Not only are software publisher concerned about piracy, many are searching for better methods of distribution, improved customer relationship management and increased revenues. In this presentation, Enthiosys proposes to give an overview of activation best-practices. This information was developed through research into the leading practices used by major software publishers in their own successful releases. It also draws from the lessons learned from the problems software publishers have encountered in their activation programs.

In today's competitive environment, where companies aggressively pursue every opportunity to grow revenue and profit, executives continue to miss a critical insight that could significantly improve their bottom line performance: pricing more profitably doesn't mean having to raise prices. In our experience of working with clients in the software industry, we see that price metrics (the unit of measure for charging prices) represent one of the biggest payback opportunities, yet is most frequently overlooked. On a daily basis, purchases are made based on a predetermined unit of measure, what we call a "price metric". The metric is the means by which a customer is charged for the use, purchase, or consumption of a product or service. Gasoline, milk, and paint are charged by the gallon. Long distance phone service is charged by the minute, concrete by the yard, and seafood by the pound. In identifying a price metric within a well-conceived pricing strategy, six critical elements are required. This presentation will review the critical elements of developing a successful price metric:

• Track with how customers realize value
• Delineate between customer segments that receive different levels of value
• Be both measurable and enforceable
• Support customer buying habits
• Leverage channel dynamics
• Manage the competitive environment

If you can identify a new price metric that can successfully pass through these filters, you have a very good chance of adding significant incremental revenue and profit. What's more, if orchestrated well, the new metric can help you establish a new and defendable leadership position, and you can do it all without actually raising price.

Regardless of the software vertical, User Adoption is cited as a significant challenge for enterprise software vendors and their customers. This is evidenced in a recent report by the Butler Group which cited that only "50% of paid for and licensed software functionality is actually used". As the industry and software lifecycle management discipline continue to mature, accountability for effective user adoption will have an even greater impact on revenue streams and the dynamics of vendor competition. This presentation will discuss the practices and disciplines that ISVs will need to reconsider to take advantage of user adoption based competitive strategies. The presentation will discuss impacts that reach across marketing, sales, product development, implementation, and support functions. Learn how industry leaders are expanding their adoption capabilities to increase user adoption rates, secure customer satisfaction and leverage a competitive advantage with effective user adoption strategies and practices.

About Neochange
Neochange is a San Francisco based Management Consulting Company that specializes in Effective User Adoption strategies and best practices.

Several market forces are converging that may wreak havoc on vendors that are unwilling to adopt new business practices. These forces are: Heavily discounted perpetual licenses; SaaS products priced below $100/user-month; Open Source software; and Advertising-supported software offerings. As the software business continues to mature and evolve, these forces will continue to place pressure on industry revenues and profitability. Software vendors will need to respond to these pressures in measured ways to preserve their ability to grow, if not survive, in the future.

Vendors will need to develop appropriate responses as new players move into their traditional market spaces or existing competitors change business strategies and sales tactics. How much will vendors need to change to maintain or improve their competitive position? Can a company continue doing business as usual or will changes have to be made to the business model or the sales process? What is the best way to make these changes without unduly affecting existing customers? How can changes be made without jeopardizing near-term or long-term revenues?

These and other questions will be addressed. In this session the major takeaways include:

• What are the danger signs that long-term price changes are underway in your markets?
• How should business models and licensing approaches change in light of these danger signs?
• What is the right pricing approach and pricing metric that will support a strong value proposition?
• How can a company shore up current revenues to prepare for change and weather the upcoming storm?

Entitlements - detailed data about customer rights to future software upgrades and support - are key to managing software maintenance revenue. Most software companies have a limited view into what upgrades and support they owe their Fortune 1000 customers, which results in lost revenue. To complicate matters, recently some auditing firms have begun to raise revenue and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues regarding Entitlements. Find out in this session an approach to increasing revenue and avoid accounting exceptions.

Today's competitive environment necessitates that companies maximize the productivity of their employees; denial of access to critical software can severely impact that productivity. However, the high cost of such high value software, as well as changes in needs over time, make it difficult if not impossible for software users to manage their software license counts in a maximally productive yet economic manner with traditional licensing models. The competitive environment also places significant pressures on software vendors who must maximize value for their customers in order to enhance relationships and grow market share.

New software licensing models, such as time-based pay-per-use and product family license remixing, can achieve the business goals of both software vendors and software users alike. Analysis of actual software usage is a key enabler for these newer licensing models. Entering into usage-based licensing models requires accurate usage data, sophisticated tools to analyze the data, contractual terms that reflect the capability of both the data and tools, and a high degree of co-operation between software vendors and their customers.

This presentation will explore the motivation and mechanics of usage analysis enabled licensing models. It will also review some of the contractual and operational considerations of these licensing models as well as some of the limitations imposed by various decisions made when implementing such new vendor/customer relationships.

About License Tracker
License Tracker Inc. was established in 2005 as a vehicle to commercialize a second generation software usage analysis toolset. The License Tracker technology was developed by the team that developed AppTrack, a usage analysis tool first released in the early 1990s. License Tracker software is in use today by both software vendors and end users as an enabler for pay-per-use and remixing.

In this follow up session (the 1st one was at Soft summit 2005), Symantec will set the context from last year’s well attended session and take you thru the continuing success of its strategy, direction, accomplishments and lessons. Special emphasis will be placed upon the Symantec Licensing Inventory Manager (SLIM), a self help tool now available from Symantec. SLIM is a free standing, customer resident reporting tool that can help a customer understand their deployment and usage, over time, of Symantec products. It provides no licensing enforcement functionality. Information delivered by SLIM is designed to assist the customer in managing and planning their deployment of Symantec products, as well as with self management of licensing compliance.

Virtualization is currently one of the industries hottest trends and application virtualization is the newest member of this transformative technology family. Many people are already familiar with operating system virtualization and the significant benefits in both ease of administration and reducing TCO, but application virtualization might still be a mystery. This session will cover the Microsoft SoftGrid. We will show how SoftGrid can transform applications from installed entities, prone to conflicts and requiring extensive regression testing; to virtualized software, decoupled from the operating system with the result of eliminating conflicts and time consuming regression testing. The attendee will also learn how the dynamic delivery of these virtual applications results in efficient deployment of the virtual application wherever and whenever a user needs them.

Dan will discuss how centralized software asset management is key to both compliance and effective software asset management. He will talk about how centralization was achieved at Freescale and the benefits that were gained from this centralization. Dan will show the continuing evolution of software utilization metrics at Freescale. How these metrics have allowed Freescale to understand accurately determine their true license requirements, resulting in improved productivity and cost savings. Also discussed will be the value of partnerships with our vendors as well as Freescale's implementation of FLEXnet Manager.

About Freescale
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. (NYSE:FSL - News; NYSE:FSL.B - News) is a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking and wireless markets. Freescale became a publicly traded company in July 2004 after more than 50 years as part of Motorola, Inc. The company is based in Austin, Texas, and has design, research and development, manufacturing or sales operations in more than 30 countries. Freescale, a member of the S&P 500®, is one of the world's largest semiconductor companies.

OS migrations traditionally have been seen as costly and time consuming projects. One of the most significant contributors to this is the number of manual steps that need to be performed to ensure a user desktop is successfully migrated. Advances in deployment and migration technologies have meant that we can rethink the way we view these large migration projects. Furthermore there have been some significant developments in the processes used to run large scale migrations.

This session will cover the factors that 1E finds most significant in simplifying desktop migrations. It will include key processes that our consulting team have developed in conjunction with Microsoft’s Desktop Deployment team to automate the entire migration project. It will also briefly introduce some of the technologies you may consider for automation, not only for desktop migrations but also the continuing management of the entire estate. Potentially you could think about migrations as an operational exercise rather than a large and costly project.

The most common business challenge faced by enterprises is that of poor resource utilization. According to IDC the average utilization of compute resources in a data center is 15%.

GRID computing introduces the concept of sharing compute resources across the enterprise. Most users are reluctant to share their compute resources, which they paid for, fearing that when they need the compute resources they may not be available. Furthermore, IT resources are often wasted enterprise-wide because typically there is a one-to-one correlation between applications and compute resources in IT data centers i.e. one application for each hardware resource. Resources are not being shared across applications are cluster GRIDs. Each application is trying to maximize available to it and not all the resources enterprise-wide.

Poor IT resource utilization results in delayed time-to-market directly impacting company's bottom-line.

The solution to the above mentioned problems is the orchestration and virtualization of compute resources & across application types to meet workload demands based on business-driven policies allowing compute resources to scale as the business needs grows.

This presentation covers how an enterprise-wide central resource broker can enable resources to be lent and borrowed dynamically across applications to meet the corporate demand driven by business policies resulting in faster time-to-market.

Many business processes today are tied to applications running on a fixed, static IT infrastructure, which constrains usage of those applications in many ways. IT cannot respond quickly to changing business needs that require adjustments to the infrastructure – in fact, change management is a manual process that can take months to complete. And license management and utilization is built around the static infrastructure which prevents more dynamic, flexible license usage. In addition, the infrastructure itself is being quickly commoditized and very cheap to acquire. However, the management of the infrastructure continues to be very expensive and is a significant contributor to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

In this environment, optimizing application utilization can be difficult and costly.

Grid technologies are being increasingly applied to effectively tackle these challenges. By managing the infrastructure as a Grid service, IT organizations can respond very rapidly to changing business needs. The actual infrastructure becomes completely transparent to the users. License utilization is optimized as the grid dynamically allocates applications to devices based on availability and other parameters. Application characteristics are continually monitored and infrastructure changes are initiated automatically, thereby reducing the TCO and improving service levels. The resulting infrastructure is variable, dynamic and extremely cost-effective for the organization.

This presentation discusses in detail how Grid technology, working in concert with other technologies like server virtualization and consolidation, can enable this transformation.

This session will explore how today's software development process, which has radically changed over the past few years, is potentially putting companies at risk during M&A events. In the past, software development has been left to the technical staff, but it has quickly become a topic of great concern to executives, venture capitalists with investments in software-driven companies and investment bankers.

The change has occurred because today's developers are members of an active and interconnected global community, combining open source code with their own to make improvements. But this process can easily bypass company policies and procedures on software acquisition and licensing review and approval, and the result often is significantly increased business risk.

By combining external components with their proprietary code, companies create a complex mix of intellectual property that carries licensing obligations with which companies must comply. In a mixed-IP environment, the volume of software licenses to be understood and tracked can quickly become a challenge. Further, those licenses often conflict with one another and can result in software assets with serious intellectual property problems.

To ensure software license compliance, companies need clear visibility into the origins, ownership, and license requirements of each component used. Once companies put in place a system that allows them to know their software code and to remedy any problems with it, they not only reduce their chances of license infringement, which can have business-level implications, they make it possible to increase their use of externally created software in a safe manner.

By gaining control over the intellectual property aspects of software, developers are able to select and use the best externally sourced components knowing they are not infringing on patents, copyrights, or trade secrets, or worrying that they will be forced to publish proprietary software to the open source community.

Today there is no consistent way to measure suspicious behavior, application stability and environmental hostility across multiple IT, corporate and geographic domains. Runtime intelligence combines application data with business information to enable a new generation of controls. This session will present a simple way to securely aggregate this information and present it safely, cheaply and in a role-specific context improving operational transparency and application management.

EDA Vendor licensing roadmaps:
Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor Graphics will be co-presenting on their licensing roadmap updates

Industry trends show that software will increasingly be distributed and used following the model of Software as a Service (SAS), whereby software is hosted centrally and accessed by users over a network or internet. The successful deployment of service-based software requires integration into multiple tiers of the hosting enterprise, known as the N-tier architecture. Such complex software systems require support for a variety of operating systems, database servers, and application servers. Software vendors who produce such software require an installation mechanism that handles a wide array of environments yet is easy for their customers to install and configure.

This session will be an overview of best practices involved in such application deployment using industry standard tools such as InstallAnywhere and InstallShield. Topics will specifically include:

• Deployment of WAR, EAR files into J2EE containers
• Configuration of web application servers
• Creation and configuration of database systems
• Providing a good installation user experience

Innovation Games are a set of proven market research techniques designed for all types of customer groups that help companies create innovative products and services. They are a means of fueling innovation by understanding what your customers really want. Innovation Games are unique in that:

• Each game leverages research from cognitive psychology and organizational behavior
• They utilize verbal, written, visual and nonverbal forms of communication thereby providing greater volumes of information than that obtained by more traditional research methods
• Games are relaxed (actually fun!) and extremely interactive
• Improved customer participation yields greater insights into what customers truly want in a product or service

Nora Denzel will discuss emerging trends in utility computing, the role played by service oriented architectures, and the importance of infrastructure in delivering on the utility computing promise. Denzel’s talk will address how innovations like virtualization and management can help IT professionals develop and deploy agile and adaptive environments.

This presentation will provide a framework for understanding software value management and offer prescriptive ways for software vendors and enterprises alike to improve the way they do business. Select companies will be cited as excellent case studies for how companies are maximizing the value of their software. The presentation will also cover salient findings from the annual SoftSummit Licensing & Pricing study based on a survey of 500 software vendors and their enterprise customers

The core theme of this presentation is on the importance of value generation in determining successful pricing and licensing models. To create value, software vendors must first understand market dynamics and its impact on customer needs and behavior.

This presentation will look at:

• Current pricing and software market trends
• Pricing opportunities and challenges software vendors face today
• The future outlook for software licensing

The last 20 years was about data. The next 20 years is about content.

Relational databases have been fantastic when information is predictable, when data fits neatly into rows and columns, where schemas are known and where reports are preplanned. An extraordinary industry filed with world class companies is in existence because of this platform. But, only 10% of all information is in the database. The other 90% is in the file system. That information is comprised of content, better known as documents (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .pdf, email, html, etc.). Unlike data, where these documents are coming from and where they're going is a total unknown. It just happens. What's needed is a new platform that can take unstructured data, an unknown schema and an understanding for the context of the content to find, bind and publish information in a whole new way.

Global, technical and economical needs affect licensing in so many ways and creating licensing programs and models that reflect organization’s needs becomes increasingly challenging. Learn how Microsoft is addressing some of these challenges.

A traditional perpetual-licensing model fueled Wind River's growth for nearly 20 years, allowing Wind River to become the market leader in device software optimisation (DSO). As the software market matured this "single-size-fits all" business model alone is no longer sufficient to address maximise opportunities and maintain high rates of growth expected of public software companies. This presentation will review Wind River's experience as they successfully transitioned to a subscription business model and introduced new licensing options, including utility pricing.

Daniel Greenberg, VP Worldwide Marketing, Software Technology Group of Macrovision will present three specific strategies that software vendors can implement to increase software revenues, focused on how vendors can:

• Prevent revenue leakage from unlicensed usage
• Price more intelligently to achieve deeper market penetration
• Package products more creatively for segmented markets

Software & hardware publishers who implement electronic licensing to price, package and protect their products still face the challenge of how to create seamless licensing processes – for themselves, their channel partners and their customers. This presentation introduces the five best practices for streamlining the operations around your licensing processes. It includes examples of publishers that Macrovision has worked to implement effective electronic licensing.

The discussion will provide a walk through of the benefits, costs, and opportunity costs of investing in an update strategy as well as a discussion on common pitfalls. EarthLink’s roll out of an Update service to its 5 million users will provide the back drop for the discussion.

The presentation will provide software vendors with the information and perspective they need to develop and begin to implement a strategy that distances, as much as possible, the price of their software from the price of the hardware that enables it. Session attendees will leave with a better understanding of the following:

• The disadvantages and long-term perils of closely linking the price of software with the hardware that enables it,
• The advantages software vendors and their customers will realize when software pricing is more closely linked to the value it delivers,
• Software licensing options that can increase the distance from hardware-based metrics and more closely align to value delivered,strategies and tactics that can be deployed to effectively manage the transition from their current licensing model to the model they select for the future.

Are you baffled about how to price your products? Learn a market-driven approach to figure out how to price your products

The presentation will discuss how centralized license management, intelligent purchasing based on usage analysis, and optimizing usage between grids, server farms and interactive uses form the foundation for Maximizing Software Utilization Across the Enterprise. Detail will include 10 analysis points for requirements analysis as well as how this approach lowers software costs and enables Sarbanes-Oxly compliance.

The development of Linux has shown that “given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow”. This principle demonstrates the power of networked communities. Can this power be unleashed in an IT organization to transform productivity? Can these community and network concepts be applied more broadly within an enterprise, to attack difficult challenges and create competitive advantage? Understanding the motivations and patterns of interaction in the open source community yields valuable insight into how organizations can become more effective. For the CIO, or any business leader, this discussion will show that “making connections” should be an important part of your strategic thinking.

ISVs are ready to harness the extra computing capacity offered with multi-core processor technology. OS vendors, including open source, are already shipping operating systems that take advantage of multi-core processors.

The question of how to license multi-core software has been answered by Microsoft and other leading software vendors like Novell, Red Hat and Sun endorsing AMD’s recommendation to license multi-core server software applications by processor, not core.

The evolution of multi-core technology for virtualization and grid computing is now opening new debates on software licensing. Margaret Lewis, AMD commercial software strategist, will discuss how these developments will affect the new standards of software licensing and what you should do to be prepared.

A Key component to a successful OS Migration and an important part of the Deployment lifecycle is having a good Applications Management process. We will try to demystify the relationship and provide you with tools and explain the significance of the Applications Management Maturity Model.

David Cristini will be discussing application management using Macrovision tools along with Microsoft’s System Management Server 2003. During this session he will also highlight some lessons learned from companies who have done this integration.

Enterprise software pricing continues to evolve as vendors and companies alike struggle with the model that will drive the most economic benefit for both sides. This presentation will explore the fundamentals of pricing, terms, and value in the enterprise software industry, and discuss the responsibilities of the participants in the licensing process, what models are working today, and how these models may evolve in the future.

Software Value Management (SVM) is a stage of the software lifecycle focused explicitly on maximizing the value of one’s software. SVM is shared by both software publishers and their enterprise customers as they endeavor to maximize the value of their bits (that they’ve built, or that they’ve purchased). This presentation will present best practices in SVM and share some industry benchmarks based on a research study completed in September in conjunction with the SIIA involving 500 executives from the software and enterprise communities. It will cover the activities that comprise Software Value Management, provide examples of SVM in action, and conclude with key industry benchmarks that attendees can use to compare their own company’s position on the SVM continuum.

Emerging technologies, such as multi-core processors, utility computing, and mobile devices, affect current and future licensing strategies. Many vendors face the challenges of managing the complexity produced by the many variables associated with licensing products and programs, and distributing them in a global market with many diverse customer segments. Software licensing needs to be flexible—and yet consistent—to address the variety of unique business issues that face global customer segments. This presentation will describe how Microsoft has approached the diverse needs of the global market and how licensing will need to adapt to future technologies.

This presentation will focus on the software industry's transition toward recurring revenue models, illustrating the independencies between various factors driving for and against this transition and identifying the key milestones that should be observed along the way. It will discuss examples of steps that software companies are taking to build recurring revenue streams, including best practices and pitfalls to avoid when making a transition. Customer and financial community perceptions of annuity-based license models and software maintenance will also be examined.

As the world slowly emerges from a global IT and telecommunications recession, one thing is certain: Purveyors of high technology—from the largest to the most promising venture-backed start-up—will have to work harder than ever to build and sustain customer acceptance and preference for their products and services. This presentation will discuss key challenges to effective marketing and market development, including helping you assess how vulnerable is your company to fundamental marketplace change, what is the current health of your product category and those categories related to yours, do you have a winning strategy, and can you execute and sustain your strategy going forward.

Product Managers today are plagued with pricing issues, including how much should they charge for their products, what pricing models should they use, and how can they get Sales to stop giving products away. This presentation will explore what Product Managers need to know before they make important pricing decisions. It will introduce the Pragmatic Marketing Framework, a market-driven model for managing and marketing technology products, to help Product Managers become market experts and gain a better understand of their customers. It will also demonstrate how to use the Technology Product Assessment tool to assist Product Managers in making better pricing decisions.

Structural shifts in the software industry—such as consolidation, slower overall growth, and globalization of both demand and delivery—have affected the way software is priced and purchased. More attention to open source and the rise of utility-based models has also increased the complexity of software industry pricing. This presentation will review the likely changes for the buyers and sellers of software and explore how software vendors can maximize the value of their products while still meeting their customers increasing demands. It will also examine how software buyers should navigate through existing pricing models to balance strategic and operational need with cost.

New license models for software are proliferating, and the implications of subscriptions, term licenses, value bundles, and software as a service can be a challenge for vendors and confusing for customers—especially when more than one model is offered. This presentation will detail practical lessons learned and offer real-world solutions for packaging and pricing both enterprise and shrink-wrapped product lines.

While many software companies are looking to implement utility-based pricing models, most lack the critical elements necessary to develop a sound utility-based pricing strategy. This presentation will outline the key ingredients in developing a successful and profitable approach to utility-based pricing. It will highlight the critical elements required for success, including creating a utility-based pricing strategy that tracks to the quantifiable value the product provides customers, recognizing the way value changes across different customer segments and aligning utility-based metrics accordingly, and developing pricing metrics that are measurable, enforceable, and easily understood by customers.

Software and hardware publishers who implement electronic licensing to price, package, and protect their products still face the challenge of how to create seamless licensing processes for themselves, their channel partners, and their customers. This presentation will introduce the five best practices for streamlining the operations around licensing processes and will include examples of publishers that have implemented effective electronic licensing.

Pricing is the single most important profit lever, and for many companies there is substantial upside to be realized through better pricing practices. Yet most technology companies devote fewer resources to pricing than to cost cutting or growth-related initiatives. This presentation will summarize software license and maintenance pricing best practices. It will present case studies to illustrate real-life approaches to overcoming software pricing challenges, discuss how software companies should price software licenses vs. maintenance services, and explore how to best harmonize software licensing and maintenance pricing policies and practices after a merger.

Understanding license handling in its entirety is the decisive factor for the reduction of license costs. This presentation will put the fundamental ideas behind its individual tasks—including usage evaluation, cost allocation, and demand planning—into a common framework illustrating their relations and interdependencies. It will examine the benefits and opportunities arising from such a unified perspective and describe how to integrate them into one technical infrastructure. It will also describe a method for the distribution of overall license costs among the different user groups that work with these licenses.

In March 2004, SAP introduced a new licensing and packaging model for its SAP NetWeaver platform that changes it from a component-based to a suite-based product. Previously, users who purchased NetWeaver had to buy components individually. By bringing all its components together into a single package with a simpler pricing model, SAP is bringing clarity to NetWeaver with a platform strategy that is more cost effective and beneficial to its users. This presentation will discuss SAP’s pricing and distribution strategies and how it affects its partner ISVs, especially those that sell into SAP's install base.

With the introduction of its flagship product, MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0, Citrix launched a new licensing infrastructure that addresses Citrix licensing needs now and into the future. This presentation will discuss the drivers and justification for license system changes, Citrix’s specific implementation of the Macrovision toolset, and considerations to make prior to transitioning to a new licensing infrastructure.

BSA conducts anti-piracy programs around the world on behalf of leading software publishers, including Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Macromedia, Microsoft and Symantec. This presentation will give an inside view of how BSA’s anti-piracy programs operate, particularly in light of legal, technological, and marketplace developments. It will also discuss recent activity in Congress to combat piracy, including legislation to strengthen the hand of IP owners and one bill which, if enacted, would make it more difficult to rely upon technical protection measures.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of IBM's Autonomic Computing and the constituent technologies and will discuss in-depth IBM's Solution Installation. It will also provide a summary of IBM's partnership with InstallShield/Macrovision in Solution Installation, describing IBM's plans for reducing IT complexity and InstallShield/Macrovision's plans for providing accompanying solutions.

The pace of change today is phenomenal, forcing CIOs to try to balance the traditional goals of IT—better return on investment, higher productivity, and minimum risk—with the new metric of agility. An Adaptive Enterprise is one that can help bring balance to this equation, while managing change more effectively by linking business strategy with a company’s IT resources. This presentation will discuss why an Adaptive Enterprise is the right strategy for businesses today, what is driving companies to become more agile and adaptive, and where and how a company can begin to become more adaptive to get a better return on their IT investment.

Today’s time-based licenses and subscription-based licensing models are quickly running out of gas. They no longer provide vendors with the opportunity for additional revenue when license requirements increase, and on any given day they leave the customer with either too few software licenses or too many. This presentation will discuss how these license models evolved and why they are no longer effective. It will outline several variations of utility pricing, discuss their pros and cons, and explain how utility software pricing models can be a win-win for both the customer and the software vendor.

To reduce license costs, you must understand license handling in its entirety. This presentation will put the fundamental ideas behind its individual components—such as usage evaluation, cost allocation, and demand planning—into a common framework to illustrate their relationships and interdependencies. It will show the benefits and opportunities arising from a unified perspective and describes how to integrate these elements into one technical infrastructure. The presentations will also describe a method for the distribution of overall license costs among different user groups that allocates these costs in a comprehensible, non-arbitrary way.

This presentation will evaluate various software licensing models by comparing and contrasting perpetual, time-based, and subscription licensing arrangements in order to determine when each is appropriate for business needs. It will focus on how software revenue recognition accounting rules drive both pricing and contract terms for both the vendor and the software user.

The deployment of applications and patches is one of the most common—and important—functions of any IT department. Yet many IT teams fail to properly prepare their software packages for deployment, resulting in rollouts that crash mission-critical applications and drain IT resources. This presentation will discuss application packaging and management best practices that enable organizations to reduce their software deployment errors and costs. It will explain the value of migrating applications to Windows Installer, highlight the critical steps in creating reliable software packages and deploying tested patches, and explore ways for IT to centrally manage the entire process.

The Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC), one of the four supercomputer centers chartered by the Department of Defense High Performance Modernization Program (DoD HPCMP), has over 3,000 CPUs, 3 terabytes of RAM, and 40 terabytes of disk space, as well as over 150 software packages that encompass a wide variety of computational disciplines. The management of these codes would be a challenge for any organization with a healthy budget, let alone for the government. This presentation will detail some of the strategies that the ASC MSRC has used to enhance efficiencies in a time of dwindling budgets.

This presentation will discuss the centralized license operations at AMD. It will examine how reports and measurements have been used over many years to track actual license usage for contract management, charge back allocations, and forecast future needs and spending, and how the entire process of budget and capacity planning with customers, management, and with vendors is enhanced by the availability of historical data.