Software Monetization Featured Article

Extreme Networks is not a stranger to transformation.  They have evolved its business model over the past 20+ years through a combination of development ingenuity and corporate acquisitions. Extreme is now embarking on a new transformation to a software-centric business and deliver customer driven networking solutions.

Extreme Networks (News - Alert) has partners with Thales Group/Gemalto and its Sentinel ® solutions to embark on its transformation using software licensing as the platform to license, protect and deliver their new software and customer-centric products. The move represents a major shift in the way Extreme has traditionally done business.

“Historically, we just sold a software and hardware bundle together and we attached services to it, and we put it through a channel,” said Liam Kiely, VP of Strategic Technology at Extreme Networks. “Moving forward, we want to be able to disaggregate those, sell our applications in the cloud, sell them on premise. That’s a huge shift.”

The company is no stranger to change, acquiring Zebra Technologies’ (News - Alert) Wireless LAN business in 2016 and Avaya’s networking business in 2017. As a power player in the network management and access control space, the shift to a software-centric model makes sense as the industry utilizes software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud-based solutions to keep pace with the IoT and the demands of web-scale networking.

For its part, Sentinel solutions is working with technology companies to make the transformation to software-centric business models.  HPE continues to amaze with their innovation and delight their customer’s with a great customer experience.  By automating the software supply chain, HPE provides it’s customers with a self-service portal where they can get service and updates any time they want it,but also have the ability to provide real time feedback to HPE which has resulted in increased customer satisfaction, improvements in operations, and now have a mechanism for collecting, analyzing and reporting on customer feedback.

 QSC, a traditional hardware company servicing the rock and roll industry began its transition by transforming to a software-centric business because their passion is to deliver value to their customers by giving them many modern business models and ensuring that they remain focused on innovation to maintain their lead and edge in their competitive market.  

Viavi Solutions, a provider of communications test and measurement as well as optical technologies, also recently selected Gemalto’s (News - Alert) Sentinel for its software license management system transformation. And a vendor that develops lighting measurement applications for a range of vertical markets also recently adopted Sentinel to automate its software monetization process.