10 License Management Software Solutions
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What Is a License Management Software?
Software applications are imperative in our ever-increasing data-driven economy. Companies utilize more and more complex solutions to preserve or increase their business’ competitive edge.
With this increased demand and corresponding increase in new software products comes an increase in one of the major problems plaguing this industry — piracy.
This is where license management software plays an important role. These tools can be used to track software installed in systems and find out if each installation is licensed.
So let’s look at 10 license management software solutions companies can use.
Whitesource
Whitesource detects vulnerabilities and enforces license policies on the code base and goes as deep as the dependencies of each package used. It can identify each and every open source component used in the project.
As software developers nowadays depend on a lot of open source code and packages, it’s unavoidable that vulnerabilities find their way to the company’s code base. Apart from that, some packages that claim to be open source may be using licensed components.
The main benefit is that the developers and the company don’t have to worry. Whitesource can keep the code maintainers sane by only watching those vulnerable dependencies that are actually used in the code base.
Main Features/Benefits:
It provides automatic detection of vulnerable packages, including dependencies, in the code base.
It reduces 85% of security alerts by prioritizing only those security vulnerabilities on dependencies that are actually used.
It provides real-time alerts — so the company can take action right away.
It automatically generates detailed and accurate reports ensuring information is always fresh.
Torii
Most software is delivered as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products. Unlike the traditional method of software value delivery, SaaS products make enterprises flexible. Access to features (or to the SaaS product itself) is limited to registered users.
Torri is a platform that allows the company to track SaaS usage. It provides information such as what SaaS products are used by which personnel and how much is being spent on each SaaS account.
Main Features/Benefits:
Integration of data from all SaaS used within the enterprise
Discovery and tracking of each SaaS usage including expenditures in each
Analysis of such usage in order to provide optimization opportunities
Automate onboarding, account renewal and user registration processes
AssetSonar
Managing all IT assets is a huge task. From information management to managing software licenses and compliance. These become too burdensome for an enterprise as the number of such IT assets increase.
Enter AssetSonar, which detects and tracks all hardware and software IT assets. With this, AssetSonar reduces a company’s administrative costs related to IT asset management in several locations.
Main Features/Benefits:
Reduce company overhead through detecting and tracking (through tagging) all hardware and software assets.
Make tracking IT inventory seamless through information such as purchase orders, low stock alerts, asset location.
No headaches managing user permissions, password policies, arbitration and signature captures.
Always have meaningful and insightful reports for quick decision making.
Snow License Manager
Snow License Manager provides license management solutions for traditional software, SaaS and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) products. Among this list, Snow is one of those that are focused solely on license management. However, its benefits spread across different aspects of IT asset management.
Its main feature is providing an enterprise with an integrated view of all of its cloud, software and hardware assets including license and usage information.
Main Features/Benefits:
Manage costs and financial risks associated with license non-compliance and unoptimized asset utilization.
Allows users a fast start by quickly identifying almost 100,000 software publishers and over half a million applications.
Allows for flexible use as it can both be delivered over the cloud and on-site installation.
Reprise License Manager
Reprise License Manager is geared more for software publishers to implement pricing models and provision of licenses.
Reprise provides an API for administrators to deploy licensing models. It allows software publishers to securely provide access to end users using public-key cryptography.
It’s also flexible in terms of delivery as the software can either be accessed through the cloud or through an on-site installation.
Main Features/Benefits:
Its easy to integrate and robust API allows for a smooth and seamless start with it.
It provides easy monitoring and access of licenses through a browser-based interface.
Its capacity planning tool helps in forecasting of additional license requirements.
Snap-IT
Among the open source options, one of the best out there is Snap-IT. It’s a web-based license and asset management tool. It’s very flexible as it runs on Windows, Mac or Linux based operating systems.
Probably the only requirement for the user is knowledge of setting up web servers using the LAMP stack.
But while it’s an awesome open-source tool, the only drawback is that because the user may need to make custom settings, strange bugs are known to appear.
Main Features/Benefits:
Users accustomed to managing their licenses on spreadsheets (such as Excel) can easily port to Snap-IT and see drastic improvements in their work flow.
Its one-click check-in makes accessing information an easy process.
It is highly configurable owing to its open-source nature. Users can easily customize the software based on their needs.
FOSSology
FOSSology is another open source option. It’s offered by the Linux Foundation under the GNU General Public License v2. You can use it to run licenses, copyright and export scans from a central command line.
One of the best parts about it is it allows a user to examine software packages in multi-user environments.
FOSSology can be integrated into most automated workflows as most of its functionality is done on the command line.
Main Features/Benefits:
Its Nomos license scanners allows the use of regular expressions for scanning software licenses helping to eliminate false positives.
It allows for easy copyright monitoring.
ManageEngine Desktop Central
ManageEngine Desktop Central, according to its official website, is a unified endpoint management solution.
What this means is that all devices are managed in a central location. It is not just a license management tool but a full class asset management platform.
Desktop Central can be used in different operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux) across different device types. It also allows technicians to automate most desktop management tasks.
Main Features/Benefits:
It allows for remote waking up and shutting down of endpoint devices.
It provides for easy monitoring of users working on which machine.
Hardware changes are easily detectable through inventory logs.
Cryptlex
Cryptlex is a software licensing API whose main objective is the protection of an enterprise against software piracy. It offers its most secure type of software protection through its node-locked-licensing feature on online activations.
Cryptlex’s clean and simple dashboard makes it a charm to work with. Its dashboard allows easy additions, updating and deletions of product keys, versions and users.
Main Features/Benefits:
It integrates nicely with known e-commerce platforms.
Most users find it one of the easiest to implement license manager.
Cryptex is lightweight and its clean interface makes work flows simpler.
SaaSTrax
SaaSTrax is a cloud-based platform for license and vendor management. It eliminates waste and excess expenses by tracking unused software and redundant subscriptions.
Administrators are enabled to assign active subscriptions to new employees and easily transfer subscription assignments upon employee departure. Another value to administrators are the real time alerts SaaSTrax sends in relation to subscription issues.
SaaSTrax prides itself with its dashboard which allows one-stop management of all IT assets of the company. The dashboard shows information such as who uses what, which subscriptions are unused, and shows some neat graphs.
Main Features/Benefits:
It helps company administrators to determine which software subscriptions to keep and those to cancel — thus reducing wasted money.
It allows for easy feedback by employees on which software they mostly use and which ones are not necessary.
It allows users to quickly identify which subscriptions to cancel or transfer the moment an employee leaves.
SoftwareKey System
SoftwareKey System is a turnkey solution for software publishers for licensing, software activation and selling software.
SoftwareKey System makes it easy to customize licensing solution for clients thus giving the publisher a way to provide excellent experience to their customers.
SoftwareKey’s system is a two-fold platform — a licensing client and a licensing server. Each can be used independently but should be used together for best results.
Main Features/Benefits:
Non-coders can easily implement licensing, removing the need for expensive manpower to use.
Being a turnkey solution allows for quick implementation and integration to company’s existing setup.
Most customers are raving about SoftwareKey System’s excellent customer support.
Conclusion
The choice you make will obviously depend on your specific use case. As you may observe there are two kinds of use cases mentioned in the list above — for software publishers and for enterprises buying and using licensed softwares.
The main benefit for both cases is making sure software, whether deployed through the cloud or installed on site, should abide by license rules.
There are many other benefits of using any one of these 10, including being able to manage your IT assets painlessly and remotely.