Study: Software Vendors Needed A 3rd-Party Monetization Solution. Here’s Their Experience Using Thales’ Sentinel.

It’s 2023, and if you are a software provider, you’ll lose market relevance if you do not monetize your software to maximize revenue. Software monetization (SM) is secure licensing which accomplishes two goals: 1) prevents revenue leakage and 2) enables feature entitlement for upsells and cross-sells. Those who tested in-house customized solutions found them costly and inflexible, leading to software providers pining for a worthwhile 3^rd party SM solution.

One such SM solution, used by thousands of companies, is Thales’ Sentinel. This SM platform is a configurable, highly scalable software licensing solution that enables new or expanded revenue streams for software manufacturers. To assess the impact of Sentinel on customers, Thales commissioned Forrester Consulting to provide their Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study. Below is a summary of this study.

Background on Thales Sentinel Software Monetization Platform

Thales provides software licensing and entitlement systems for subscription, pay-per-usage, token, concurrent, and standalone pricing models at both product and feature levels. The solution can be deployed via Cloud, on-prem, or hardware keys. Functions are configurable and automated, and integrate with CRMs, ERPs and other commonly used enterprise software.

Forrester interviewed Thales customers to evaluate costs, benefits, and risks of the platform.

Why Not Go In-House?

Prior to implementing Sentinel, most interviewees tried developing an in-house solution to expand sales with machine learning (ML) capabilities, new licensing packaging options, and SaaS deployment. However, they found that production costs for such a configurable solution were prohibitive, and individual customization for each capability change was too time consuming. Moreover, in-house trials were not user-friendly, did not meet unpredictable market demands, and were insufficient to replace existing legacy solutions. Bottom line: In-house SM costs were too high and could not meet time-to-market needs. Since homegrown solutions were not meeting current requirements,

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