Cloud Computing: The Future of Concurrent Licensing (Part 1)

Grazed from FlexeraSoftware. Author: Pete Johnson.

Concurrent licensing, also called “Network Licensing” or “Floating Licensing”, has been around a long time. It was first developed to offer a more cost effective way to license high-priced engineering software so that customers did not have to buy one license for every engineer in the company; with concurrent licensing they could share the licenses. Since the cost of such a license is typically very high, there needed to be a way to secure these sharable licenses so that the customer did not use more than what they were entitled to.

In this 2-part blog series, we will look at concurrent licensing: what it is, how it’s used, and what the future holds.

What is Concurrent Licensing?
Concurrent licensing is a system where a fixed number of licenses for an application are made available to an entire network. These licenses allow up to “n” copies of the specified application to run at the same time, anywhere on the network. The application can run on any machine that is on the network, as defined by the software license, but typically in a single geographical location. The fact that the license can allow the application to run on different machines is where the terms “Floating License” and “Network License” come from, in that this ability allows the license to “float” around the “network”…

How are the Licenses Managed?
The most common way of managing concurrent licenses is by using a network license server. This server reads a license file that contains the credentials of the license, typically a product or feature name along with the number of licenses that have been authorized. When a user attempts to run the licensed application, the application has code built into it that checks the license server to see if there are available licenses. If so, the application “checks out” the appropriate license and the license server decrements the number of available licenses. Once all of the available licenses are checked out, another instance of that application cannot start up until a license is checked back in, usually when the application terminates…

Read more from the source @ http://blogs.flexerasoftware.com/elo/2013/07/the-future-of-concurrent-licensing-part-1.html