Name: Cloud Monetization Fundamentals: Cloud License Management and User-based Licensing
Uploaded: 2025-11-11T16:30:41.783Z
Duration: 40 min 38 s
Description: Cloud Monetization Fundamentals: Cloud License Management and User-based Licensing

Transcript for "Cloud Monetization Fundamentals: Cloud License Management and User-based Licensing": Sure. Okay. So let me bring up my slide. So this is, software monetization office hours. We'll be talk taking you through the, Cloud monetization self-service that we have recently added and a new approach to user based monetization. Now I'm joined with, Sanjay, who is an engineering manager who will demonstrate the first part of the session, and then Resma. She's a technical product owner for, cloud monetization, and she will join us for the new approach to user based monetization demo. So, I'll I'll keep, going and I mean, because in in and how we are going to talk about self-service for cloud monetization and a demo and then a new approach, like I said, to user based licensing. What what you'll experience is the state today, the consequence of how it works today, a new approach, the demo, and then upcoming enhancement, followed by question and answer session that, for any question that you might have. Right? So let's get started. Part one, self-service for cloud monetization. Right? In Flexera operations cloud today, right, you have no UI assistance to manage or manage certain important aspects of your cloud license server that, I know, results into, inefficient cloud license server management, giving you no visibility into the in use data as a producer operator who is helping a lot of, your buyers, or sometimes you will hear that your end customer license admin is also having limited capabilities or visibility into, what their cloud licensing service instance has. Right? There's also an overall feedback that, you have a powerful, named license pools and rules of access capabilities in flexible embedded, but, they require you to do some kind of coding and automation. Right? If there was an UI assisted ability to work with that, it'll help you a lot. Now in short, if you are a seller or a producer, with the new capabilities that Sanjay will demonstrate in some time, you will no longer experience fragmented operations, where you will see reports here and there. You will have a single view of your cloud licensing service. You might have often heard your end customer's license admin, bring you bring this up during their renewals that, yeah, we we like the way your cloud licensing service works for us. However, we're not happy with the self-service aspects of it. And then you might have these, producer operator who are folks at the producer's company or the seller's company helping the not one, many buyers to manage their cloud license servers and give them a visibility into features, active clients that are holding up the license and, helping the license admin to create and manage the license pools and write rules of access to who has access to the capabilities on a Cloud licensing service. Think of this producer operator as somebody who has, a view into every end customer's Cloud licensing service and is trying to, help them solve their, licensing operations. Right? And the I mean, the biggest influencer here, even, your end customer license admin, they have their own customer portal. Now they will get a visibility, when they browse a Cloud license server instance, a visibility into all these, features, active clients, and they will have a UI assisted way of managing the named license pools and rules of access to the Cloud licensing service. Before we jump into the demo, here's a small slide that I want to leave you with on if you are a regular user of Flexera Operations Cloud. When you see the devices, when you go to the devices menu and see your devices listed, if you happen to select a cloud license server instance and click on that link, you will see a a newer improved interface that gives you a, tab for overview, the features that that specific cloud licensing service instance has, the active clients, and the named license pools that are there. Now before I hand it over to, Sanjay, I just wanted to, call out that, we're not stopping with just these capabilities. In q one twenty twenty six and q two twenty twenty six, you will have a UI assisted or wizard based named license pools and the rules of access capabilities in the same area where you are seeing this improved enhancements. There is also, a use case that we are considering, where, your end customer license admin could browse the employees who work at that organization through an IDP, make select those employees and make direct assignments to the licenses that are there on the cloud licensing service, a very important use case for user based, licensing. With that, I'd request, Sanjay to take over and take us through a demo of the new capabilities. Hi, Sanjay. Hi. Hi. Hi, everybody. Thank you for, the detailed information, Ravi. So let me share my screen. Is the screen visible now? Yes, Sanjay. Yeah. So, before we move on to the new page implementation, right, I'll just walk you through how the old device page or the cloud license, overview page look like. So I've just logged into one of the, local environment. And, when you click on the devices page, this is how the old overview page of our license server looked like. It did not have the, no features tab, active clients page tab, or the new license pool tab here. So this is where you need you had to create the device and map your licenses. But, with the new capability, what happens is, when you go on to the devices page and you click on any of the CLS instances, you get to see the new tabs, along with the overview of what you used to see previously. So, this is the overview of our CLS device that's already created. When you click on features, you get, you know, the summary summary of the list of features that are assigned to that device. And, when you go on the details page, each feature, which which active client has consumed that feature. Basically, you can go and see what are the client records and everything. Similarly, when you click on to, active clients, each client, which each device, what feature it has consumed. So all these detailed information is provided in this page. And, also, along with active plans, you can basically navigate to the name license pool and, upload a model or, rules of access file and and view that license pool, basically, and assign features. This is a capability at the producer side, but when you, you can also look the same capability is available at the end user portal. I'm just looking at the same CLS device here. On clicking on that device, you can basically see what are the list of features assigned to that particular CLS instance, details and the features, and there are corresponding active clients. And the same that is available in active clients and each device with the feature that it has consumed, similarly, with the name license pool. Yep. Okay. That's. it. So, yeah, if if you guys did not know this feature is already, live in the, Flexera operations cloud, Please go ahead. Try it out. If you have some enhancements or further requests on this, do let us know. We are also happy to talk to one of your end customer license admin, to interview them and see what are the other things that they might want to see in the way they manage their cloud license server assignments. Okay. Thank you, Sanjay, for, this wonderful demo. I'm I'm going to grab the screen and move into the next part of, today's session. That's the new approach to user based monetization. Alright? So, I mean, in in FlexNet, embedded and cloud monetization, right, currently, as a seller or a producer, you can implement user centric licensing. Nothing that we are going to show today is not possible. But what we know is to achieve all that, the producer or the seller has to do a lot of customization around the current functionalities that we have. They will have to rely on using fields that are not intended to capture the user information and an ability to do user centric licensing. We've we've had feedback that this results in and, and the kind of limited scalability that the producers, have, meaning their solution work for their products, but they don't translate to a standard industry practice of how user centric licensing can best be done. They get a view of fragmented data because these to achieve all these, you're using nonstandard fields, which makes it difficult for our data warehouse and reporting to give you an aggregate or normalized form of, some of the critical question you might want to answer about user based, user centric licensing. Right? The same story for reporting. And then, when someone reaches out to us and says, can you do this enhancement, for me to create a different selling point or monetize my FlexNet embedded or cloud monetization solutions? Then we say that, oh, if you're not using a standard field, it's very difficult for us to create an enforcement logic or rules around the user. Right? So let let's let's step forward and what, Resma is going to demonstrate today. And we started by saying I mean, this is, definitely our focus in 2026. But by q four twenty twenty five, we were targeting to see, what if you as a seller could answer these critical questions, if you have license using FlexNet embedded or cloud monetization? Who is the user? Where is this user logged in across the devices or desktop or laptops? What capabilities or the features are held by this user? And for, when and how long are these capabilities held? What's the capacity or count that was consumed by that user? Right? We all know FlexNet embedded is regenerative. And the moment the user logs in from a different device, the the data goes into history and then you can't kind of collate this kind of insights very easily. Right? So, if you could answer all these critical questions, which is possible by q four twenty twenty five, Our idea was, that you as a seller can create more effective user centric license models. You could provide a multi user or multi device experience to your customers. You can create different selling points too and, things like, okay. I'm doing a user based monetization, and I want to control how how many different devices can user log in from. Or simply say, I have a software. I want to control how many users can concurrently access a capability of my software. Right? And all that. Right? So, and also, that you don't have to do a lot of customization and heavy lifting on the application side, to achieve all this if this was provided out of the box, and you have a 2026 road map that will continue to build on these principles of providing a native user centric licensing from FlexNet embedded. So I I mean, I I I I I mean, I asked some critical questions, and the sample answers could look like a user, John, has logged in from his Windows desktop, an iOS mobile app, and a web browser. So FlexNet embedded could help you answer this question on who is the user and what are the different devices that he or she is logged in from, and what capabilities are held by this user on different devices. And Rismise picked up this dataset to demonstrate, demonstrate, in in a while, how, the user has been using a dashboard capability or analytics capability that you as a seller has designed. Right? And for how long has this user borrowed these, capabilities and how much? Right? Meaning, one count of each feature or what is that? Right? So, what what if you could, answer these questions and then strategize on how you want to create different selling points based on user? Okay. So I think, before I pass it over to Resma and then we get into q and a, what you will see in q four twenty twenty five is, this complete picture of who, where, when, what, and how much. In q one twenty twenty six, we'll be focusing on a use case where if you are a software as a service or IDM, and you are onboarding or provisioning users onto your service or a device, then an important capability is for your buyer to find out who are the employees or users in my organization that needs a license assignment. Right? So you will have an UI assisted way for your end customer license admin or sometimes producer operator to browse your customer's ID ident IDP, make pick up the employees or users and make direct assignments onto the features that are available in, cloud licensing service, right, or a local license server eventually. And then, in q two twenty twenty six, we are thinking about giving, producer governance. Right? As a seller, you might want to, start any cloud licensing service with an explicit deny, meaning you almost always want the license admin to make explicit assignment to users to have to grant access to, the users who are going to use their purchases. Right? So, those are the things that we'll be focusing on q two twenty twenty six. While we've not advertised anything beyond this, the, team will also be parallelly focusing on the multi user, multi device XPs. But, yeah, this this is something that we are, confident to advertise and achieve by q two twenty twenty six. Yeah. Before I pass it to Resma, I see a question on, the chat. How do you prevent generic name surfing? Example, file.user@company.com. If if I got this question right, is is is this about, is the I I won't use the word fear. It's I mean, for the lack of better words. It's the fear that, somebody, some customer who owns a cloud licensing service. Okay. Multi user sharing the same login. Okay. Yeah. How do you prevent direct user? Multi user sharing the same login. Okay. Yeah. So, in the producer governance controls, you will have policy, to see, how do you want to treat your users. So you could have multiple users, sharing the same login or same user logging in from different browser windows and all that. The kind of use cases we hear is on how do you count those requests with the same name. Right? So, you will have options of setting the license sharing policies where, you you you tell the license server to count each user once or multiple session of users as different counts and consume more quantity. Right? So so so you will control this via counting policies. It depends on the seller's preference if they, want to count every login or they want to, count once per user across devices and put guardrails on how many different devices they can log in from or how great how many different sessions they can log in from. And session ID also is something that will come in future in addition to user, for developing that uniqueness. Glad, Martin, that I answered your question. But yeah. I mean, if you if you're interested, I I mean, please follow-up with an email. I'll be happy to, help you. Resma, I'll I'll pass it over to you. Okay. So there's another question from Harry. To start with so his question is is user based licensing only available for license server, or can it also be used for node locked licenses? So, in in q by q four twenty twenty five, you have the support for, cloud licensing service. We'll also add support for local license server. The FNE SDK that enables you to do this, node locking or the seat based models, is planned for, q two twenty sorry, q three twenty twenty six. So by q three twenty twenty six, you will also be able to do all this on an, on a node lock, scenarios, Harry. So license server now, q three twenty twenty six, even the node log stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Reshma, over to you. I'll okay. I'll have to stop sharing for Reshma to, Resma, did you want to go through some slides before you jump into the demo? Yeah, Ravi. Okay. You can go to the next slide. Okay. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So we had a good overview with hello, all. Greetings for the great day. And we had an overview from Ravi Trivedi regarding the, the business, concerns regarding the user based licensing. So we'll have a short demo where we will look in detail about the technical execution or what we have achieved as part of our first initiative. So, basically, what we have done was, like, we tried to add or we wanted to add the who factor into the user centric licensing, where we added a new field called as a user identifier. And this field is, available for your request, signed access request, and preview request. And the addition of this new identifier, which will uniquely associate license usages to a unique user, is going to, ensure identification of user across diff different devices and sessions. And, this enhancement actually applies to both the licensed models metered and concurrent usage models. Going forward, so we have six endpoints which is going to support you so that you can avoid this user information. As I told, you are able to use your access request, signs acts signed access request and response, preview request and response. Also, we have three endpoints where we will be able to query and gather your usage information with respect to the unique user identifier. So, with this introduction, I'll move directly, into the demonstration. Ravi, you can stop sharing. Okay, Revenera. Yeah. Okay. I have a very short video, so hope the screen is visible. So yeah. Yeah. So the platform I have used for this demo yeah. The platform which I have used for this demonstration is the postman collections. So, as I told, we can add this information where your your unique user identifier information as part of your access request, where in the body of the request, you are able to add your user identifier equals to value and also regular other information which used to post as part of this request, the feature information. So if you see, I have used the feature information. Two features I have, added here. One is the publisher dashboard and advanced analytics. And here, I'll be shooting a request for a specific device, device ID two. And in the response, you will receive the unique identifier along with the device details and also the usage details with respect to each features where you will have informations related to the account, the expiry, the other, important dates related to this each of those features, which is in the, response of the access request. The second, endpoint where you will be able to make use of your unique identifier is your signed access request, where, again, you will be posting your request with your user identifier and the feature request details along with your device, which is a distinct device here, device ID three, and you'll be receiving your response in an encrypted way, which can be decrypted. In the third endpoint, which you can avail is the preview request endpoint, where, again, in the request header, you will be adding your unique identifier along with the feature details and the device details and, the informations. Like, the response will have the device information, the unique user identifier information, as well as the details about the features which you have requested here, which is publish dashboard and the analytics platform. In addition to that, we have four other endpoints also. This particular endpoint is a usage information for a specific feature along with the client, client details. So you can see the endpoint here. It's official slash features ID slash client with a query parameter of the user identifier where you are going to get, a detailed information about the specific client and with respect to the yeah. So you are going to get the details regarding the client along with the feature details, along with the host, host that is a device one, device two information, and also the unique identifier. So you can see the device one, device two, device three is queried at this endpoint along with device three, along with the unique identifier that is the user identifier. And, also, you have the client information at this endpoint. Okay. Just so this is much like telling a cloud licensing service that here's the user. Tell me what are the devices that he is logged in from or he or she is logged in from, and. what are the capabilities that you have. Okay. They're a violin. the count also. Okay. Interesting here. Exactly. Yeah. So this is all in used data. I I wonder how it looks like in the history, or, yeah, In the analytics? and all that. That that's something. Yeah. Okay. I'll show that off. Yeah. I'll demo that. Yeah. So the next endpoint yeah. So the next endpoint yeah. So did I? Yeah. Sorry. So the next endpoint is a endpoint where you will be getting all your client information where for a specific user identifier. So to see all the client associated with a specific user using the path parameter, user identifier. So you can see that this is the client ID along with the device information, and, also, you are going to have the specific unique user identifier. So in the outcome, you can see the device ID one, device ID two, device ID three, along with the unique user identifier, which has been queried across the parameter user identifier. The last endpoint is the client endpoint where you can specify a specific client ID. And using that specific client ID, you will be able to figure out, view the specific client record. Even in that client record, you will be able to see your device details, which are the distinct devices across which that specific user is, using or consuming the specific features across multiple devices. So basically, in the beginning, Revenera has actually, spoke about, the few questions which we wanted to answer when we started the user centric or user based licensing. The information about where, who, how much, when, and what regarding the license consumption. So here we have the device information, which talks about where, the user identifier, which talks about who, the count details. Yeah. This is another, where. And, also the counter details, which talks about how much, and the start, end, and update times, which will talk about when. When. So that's what I wanted to demo from a sales perspective. We didn't stop here. We have this information also available in our Snowflake warehouse in the form of, as a DAPI endpoint, also, available as a data share. So, I think the CSV file is visible. So here you can see that this is an extract from the warehouse, and you will see the consumer ID. So we call, in the warehouse, the host, details is called as consumer ID. So you can see the distinct consumer IDs from which the features has been utilized. And the warehouse, you have these, features called as items, which talks about the items which we have utilized. And, also, the unique, user, which we call a second consumer in warehouse, the John Doe. So these informations, along with all other usage information of CLS, is available in the Snowflake warehouse as, usage data as well as as as a DAPI endpoint. So this is the DAPI endpoint. Here, again, you will find all these informations available as I told. So this is item which will talk about the features in use, the I think it's a consumer. Right? Yes. Consumer ID, which talks about, where, from where this, the features have been used, and, the second consumer, which we call as the unique user identifier, which is going which, talks about who. And, definitely, we also have other metadata related to usage, timings, and start time, end time, expire, reborrow interval, everything available in this DAPI endpoint as well. So that's pretty much, the status of, the first increment of user based licensing. Over. to you, Thank. you. Thank you, Resma. It's it's interesting to see the I mean, the first few parts of your demo focused on, understanding the in use state of the user, right, until the licenses are held on the license server. But, Mhmm. an ability for producer to then view all this in data warehouse as history. Right? So once these licenses or these usages expire, they then get passed on to Flexera operations cloud. And there are three ways in which the producer can get access to it. One is going to our analytics dashboard and answering the same question if they're going back in time and trying to answer these questions. The other ways. to. integrate with our data access API. So if they have a business system or some producer implemented UI. They can call into our data access API and get information to this. Or if they're invested in. Snowflake, This can be. then they could use our Snowflake data share and get access to this, view of user. So yeah. It's, pretty interesting and powerful, Resma Maya. Thanks thanks for this demo. Thank you, Ravi. Thank you. Okay. So I'll I'll just share my PPT again and go to the slide where we are opening up for question and answers if there's any. Christine, I assume people can unmute and ask questions too. That that's also possible on this platform. Right? Not, in this sorry. not in this current configuration, but we no. No. No. No. It's but it looks like we've we've got a lot of, folks having asked some really great questions. I think Harti has one, open question. for you, Ravi. So must user identifier be unique across all product lines? No, Harti. The the answer is no because, we have customers who would host licenses of different products onto a same cloud licensing service. In that situation, you could have a user who has borrowed, capabilities from more than one product. So it it need not be, unique. So you you could get a view, where you you know the username and then the capabilities they are holding. And then the capabilities also have something called product identifier activation ID. So you will be able to build those views also. They don't have to be unique. Also, I mean, there was a question. I I said direct yes to it. Is it the responsibility of client application to ensure that user identifier is unique? Yeah. We we kind of, see that field and just treat it as a string that's coming into our licensing service. So if you have policy where if same request came, from the user from two different devices and you wanted to treat it as duplicate, those are the capabilities that we will build in future. You can very well send the same user ID and let the license server based on the producer policy, do the counting and all that. So so and and these client applications can also rely on a standard IDP. We know some sellers who use federated identity or the identity for their customers, right, where they use standard services like Azure b two c and all that. When your when your customers log in to your SaaS application, you would establish their identity, from the IDP and then use simply some aspects of it to, pass it to our licensing services through the new field that Resma demonstrated, the user identifier. So it it can the client application could use multiple techniques to capture that user information and send it. They can simply present a, the text box if if that works or simply pick up the username of the person who has logged into a, desktop application and just pass it on or extract that from the operating system for user who is logged into that machine and pass it. So, I mean, there are many possibilities. But because we rely on the client application to send this detail in access request, it will I mean, you as a seller will still have to decide how you pass it. Yep. Okay. So is this only for SaaS, apps, or does it work for traditional desktop apps also? So, we've we've started, demonstrating this on a cloud licensing service, but the same capabilities are there on local license server also. Now like I said, the SDK part that we are talking about. So if if you are, an, FNE SDK customer, you will still have to wait for the SDKs to give you that interface in the API to pass the user information that's happening in q two twenty twenty six. Six. But if you're using rest APIs to send the access request, then you can do it now. Yeah. We'll soon be there for the traditional desktop apps. But, Martin, if this is important for your success, I can look at ways to expediate, the traditional desktop apps too. I mean, the fray the framework is there. We just need to get the respective teams to start pushing information into that new field that Resma demonstrated. Sure. It's it's definitely part of our plan. Yeah. Great. We'll give folks a little more time if they have any additional questions. Great conversation, going on right now. Alright. So just a friendly reminder, under the doc section, you should see a link to next month's office hours. As you can see, hopefully, folks have been getting value out of out of these events, and, you know, we do wanna hear from you. And so if there's any other topics that you guys are interested in hearing about or, are interested in, do let us know or share it with your, you know, trusted Revenera contact, and they'll filter that information on to us. Any other questions for Ravi, Sanjay, or Reshma? Alright. Alright. Looks like we we're good to go. We'll give folks a a few minutes back. Thank. you all again for attending. Thank you, Sanjay and Resma, for your demonstrations and Ravi for facilitating this event. It was very useful, very, helpful information here, and, we look forward to seeing everybody in next month's office hours. Alright? Well, thanks again all. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you all. Bye bye. Bye.