One advantage of Reprise Software joining Vela Software’s STEM portfolio in late 2021 is our partnership with many sibling companies who utilize RLM. This relationship gives us the opportunity and obligation to use our own products in a number of different software licensing scenarios – “eating our own dog food” so to speak. However, many of these partnerships are not new. Portfolio companies like Tecplot have been using RLM for more than 12 years and have maintained a close connection all along.
Tecplot (www.tecplot.com), a leading provider of CFD post-processing and visualization software, was an early and enthusiastic adopter of RLM, using it across their entire suite of products. With over 50,000 users worldwide, including licenses at all the major space agencies and aircraft companies, finding a secure and reliable license management system at a favorable price point was mandatory. However, once the initial licensing need was satisfied, they wanted strategies to minimize the time required to serve keys to their many customers, especially at small companies who may lack IT resources, and might not want to spin up an internal license server. Instead of making traditional keys one at a time, Tecplot needed an automated solution for entitlement delivery. RLM Activation Pro was the answer.
Activation Pro activates licenses automatically over the internet, either from Reprise’s cloud service or your own servers. When integrated with your back-office systems, a push of a button in CRM results in an activation code being sent to the customer through your workflows. After being input into your program’s licensing dialogue, the code pings the activation server, and if valid, checks out a key, with updated entitlement information. This bypasses the traditional need to manually gather computer details like Hostnames and MAC addresses from the client before issuing a key, which can frustratingly become a back-and-forth series of emails to get them set up properly. Instead, Activation Pro streamlines new sales and renewals and makes it nearly impossible for the customer to have issues getting started, leaving a good impression with their newly purchased or renewed software. It gives you more information than a conventional license, letting you know how many times a code has been used, and gives the freedom to deactivate licenses whenever required. Additionally, codes are extremely flexible and can make delivering groups of licenses, rehosting licenses, offering software trials or making temporary keys easy.
Scott Fowler, Product Manager for Tecplot, noted that Activation Pro “cut our support load for making keys in half – saving dozens of hours a month for the support team, who can now focus on providing true technical support.” Not only does it save the company many thousands of dollars per year, but it also improves customer satisfaction. “There are no delays to customers getting keys. New customers are up and running immediately, and in most cases for renewals they don’t even know they are getting a new key because the activation code pings the license server in the background and downloads new keys when needed. It just works.”
If you have a need to automate your software activation, and reduce your time spent helping customers get their software running, please visit our Activation Pro web page, or email info@reprisesoftware.com to learn more about RLM Activation Pro.
