Licencing policies are difficult for software houses to get right. Which unit do they choose to charge per licence?

Which model to use?

•  per socket?
•  per instance?
• per production instance?
• per core?
• per named user?
• per hostname?
• per user?
• per usage metric?
• per site?
• per concurrent user?
• per Enterprise?
• per avergae consumption per month?
• per message?
• per socket up to a limited number of cores?

Tricky stuff!  Which one should they choose? What is the strategy behind the choice that they make?  Money? Fast Adoption? Market Share to make them ripe for buyout?

Getting this decision right will absolutely determine how successful the product is within an Enterprise business environment.

This may sound melodramatic but I have recently seen (at first-hand) some good examples of product licencing policies which have ruled out the product for being considered as standards for Multi-national blue chip companies.

Over the next few blogs I will illustrate these and hopefully make the point. I also hope that people can collaborate and share their knowledge and experience on this issue – so feel free to comment or trackback.