Industry Leading Closed-Captioning Firm Stays Safe with Sentinel HASP
When a company grows, there’s always the temptation to save time and money by installing existing software on new workstations. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it gets the job done.
But it goes against most software licensing agreements. And for software firms such as Computer Prompting and Captioning Co. (CPC (News - Alert)), it devastates revenue.
“Without powerful, reliable software security, our customers could run the same software on 20 different machines which violates the license terms and results in thousands of dollars in lost revenue for CPC,” said Dr. Dilip K. Som in a case study. “I cannot even imagine letting our product go unprotected.”
CPC is the industry leader in captioning, subtitling and teleprompting. It released the first simultaneous closed captioning/teleprompting software in 1986, and has been at the forefront of its industry ever since. With its captioning software for the Mac and Windows running between $2,000 and $9,000 per install, piracy just isn’t an option.
Yet, like much high-value software, the temptation for customers to violate the terms of the license and run a single copy of CPC’s software on multiple machines is great. CPC needed an unobtrusive, secure solution to protect its software against it being pirated, stolen or reverse-engineered.
Earlier attempts at software protection were unsatisfactory, requiring an overly large key that was awkward for technicians and hard for CPC to update every release cycle. But then CPC discovered Sentinel HASP, SafeNet’s (News - Alert) robust and no-hassle software security solution.
Sentinel HASP provides robust software security with innovative features such as licensing in virtual environments and the first and only software licensing and reverse engineering protection tool on the market that supports J2EE applications. Sentinel HASP offers time-based authorization, reverse-engineering protection and code obfuscation technology, among other features, making it ideal for companies such as CPC.
Sentinel HASP allows CPC to license their software to one machine at a time while connected to the Sentinel HASP key, preventing large clients from sharing software among equipment for increased productivity without due licensing, according to the case study. CPC also was able to grow its reach and development of new technologies because of Sentinel HASP’s flexible configurations and constant upgrades.
“With every Windows upgrade, we quickly receive the updated Sentinel HASP drivers and were able to take care of our customers promptly and efficiently,” Som said in the case study.
“Upgrading the Sentinel HASP keys to be used for higher versions of software has been very easy. Simple and accomplished via email, we’ve eliminated the wait for updates through the mail and saved on shipping. When we needed information, Sentinel HASP specialists were definitely available and able to answer our questions.”
In a fast-moving industry like television, the ability to upgrade fast, easily and securely is a big benefit. And so is peace of mind. Going with anything less than the best software security just doesn’t make sense.
“Taking that risk is out of the question,” said Som.
Edited by Peter Bernstein