Software Business in the Middle East

The 4th point of this article reminds me discussion about licensing of our product. I assumed that the licensing must be very simple, as if somebody wants to hack the program, he will do it no matter how smart your protection is. We had a professor from pharmaceutical faculty from one of the local university participated in our discussion. He pointed to one very interesting thing that is probably specific to the Middle East. Doctors and pharmacists are not used to buy stuff on their own expenses because pharmaceutical companies and their agents distribute a lot of things free of charge – kind of presents to promote the particular pharmaceutical product. In addition, all medical magazines are free. (By the way, this free stuff is not only in healthcare – here in Dubai people used to have a lot of free stuff like magazines, newspapers, seminars, training etc).

This “free stuff” environment results in the fact that doctors and pharmacists very often do not understand the licensing of the software - if one gets a CD from medical representatives, he simply feels it’s fine to give it to his colleagues who might also benefit form using the program. For those who sell licensed software, this approach courses problems, because as long as one doctor gets software, it is most likely that many of his colleagues will get a “special copy” of it too.

The conclusion of our discussion about licensing was that we would implement product activation. This is how it works. When doctor gets a program, he can use its full functionality for about 15 days – this is common for any software you can download from the Internet. Then he would need to purchase a license or otherwise the product will work with the limited functionality. All licenses we issue are stored in the License Database. When doctor enters the license into the program, the activation happens automatically by calling Web Service from our web site to mark that particular license as activated. All other attempts to activate the same license from another computer will fail. This approach works fine with about 90% of all customers. Other 10% have no Internet, so they would make a phone call to activate their licenses.

Yes, it is true that licensing is a feature that has no value for your customers. But from other hand you have to put some efforts to protect your product, especially if your market is sort of not used to buy licensed software using “special editions” of it instead.