Software product business: business models and processes : a practical approach to licensing principles and a software asset management

The purpose of this thesis is to introduce the software product business, business models and processes and give a practical approach to licensing principles and a software asset management. The software product business is living a new era due to break-through innovations concerning application, workstation and server virtualization. This process has influenced on the whole branch and forced manufacturers, distributors and resellers to their licensing policies and earning logics. The ICT-cluster is in front of the new challenges, because of the shortened life cycle of the products and continuously moving economical aspects caused by the customers, which are not willing to pay according to same licensing principles as before. The software asset management is both the challenge and the answer for the customer organizations to get direct and indirect software licensing savings and better license management. The traditional licensing policy and management are the challenges for the customers and the changes mentioned above will make it more difficult than ever. The need of the overall understanding is to acquire dedicated persons or specialized service providers to plan and manage the software asset management processes to get the best possible features and benefits of the software asset management concept. The added-value of this thesis is to give a set of tools to understand the complex licensing policy and pay attention to the possibilities of the software asset management concept