It’s Time to Rethink Our Enterprise Software Licensing Practices

Our objective in this paper is to discuss how three advancements in the enterprise software industry: 1) Software as a Service; 2) End of Availability; and 3) Software in Suites have impacted enterprise software licensing practices. Taken together, these three advancements reduce customer control over version lifecycle and purchasing scope while also shifting more standardization and timing decisions to the software vendor. These advances, particularly in combination, have impacted the acquisition process for enterprise software by increasing short-term costs for companies while also providing many benefits to enterprise software customers. We conclude that those of us involved with licensing software at enterprises need to rethink our licensing practices.