Software Business in the Middle East

I’ve read these two articles in March about software piracy in the Middle East: Saudi company’s pirated software leads to SR5 million lawsuit and Oman reseller jailed for software piracy.

Undoubtedly, software piracy is evil. You start understanding it clearer as soon as you start selling your own software. Large companies like Microsoft lose millions, if not billions from it.

But if you cannot fight the piracy, you can probably try turning it out for getting more sales in the future. It might be a kind of marketing that costs you almost nothing. I’ll give an example from our experience.

In the first version of our software we made a license key linked to the hardware where software is running – I wrote about it here. Also, we had activation over Internet or phone to make sure that each license key is activated only once.

Everything worked just fine until we had started our sales in Saudi Arabia. It seems that Internet is not yet very popular thing over there. It cost a lot of time and efforts to activate licenses over phone. And it cost a lot of money too. Finally we found ourselves working a lot on license activation rather than on making new cool stuff in our software.

After all, we have changed our licensing policy. Now it is very simple – user enters the license, and it is registered on our server automatically. This way we get statistics about how many times each key was activated. If customer has no Internet, then software gets activated on the user’s computer anyway, so we don’t get any phone calls asking for activation.

Recently one of the universities purchased a license for using our product in their computer class for the Faculty of Pharmacy. Next day I saw the license activated 8 times, couple of minutes one after another from different IP addresses – couple of minutes is just enough to install software on a new computer and enter the license key.

Does it mean we lost money? Yes, we did. In short run. But in long run I don’t really think we’ve lost anything. The university might install the program on one single machine, as they’re supposed to. Probably, they would purchase couple more licenses if they didn’t want their students staying in the queue waiting for the moment they could use the program.

But in fact, those 7 unlicensed copies of our software in the university class is just very huge benefit for us. All these copies are used by students who will then work as doctors or pharmacists. They will work for hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, health insurance companies as well as pharmaceutical companies – all of these organizations are our potential customers. Getting used to our software, these students might ask their employers to purchase the legal copy of the program.

So it seems we would even pay the university for installing our software on each computer in their computer class Later, I believe, it might be very good idea to give away our software to universities and students for free.

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