With Event Zero Product Lifecycle Monitoring solutions, software product vendors can gain unprecedented insights into their customer install base, enabling them to uncover critical information and adapt to changes far easier and quicker than ever before. Answering questions such as “How many trialware users are currently installed and not subscribed?”, becomes a realistic possibility. Despite their technical sophistication, software businesses often lack clear visibility of customer behavior, particularly with regard to how customers purchase, use, and upgrade their products. Such information is critical to inform business and technical decision making, which enables business growth – delivering more products to more customers at higher margins.

Today’s software-oriented businesses (particularly ‘shrink-wrapped product’ businesses) operate in increasingly complex and competitive environments. Typical challenges to software business operations include:

• A single software business organization may simultaneously support hundreds of different products and permutations of products (for example, various patch levels or OS platforms).
• Customer bases are often global and exhibit essentially random behavior with regard to purchase, installation, and upgrade processes— making tracking almost impossible.
• Delivering software products to customers involves many different elements of the business – product engineering, product management, licensing and purchasing, online services, core IT, customer support, and operational management; each with their own set of responsibilities.
• Increasingly software products are being delivered to customers ‘from the cloud’ – virtualized online infrastructure combining both internal and outsourced capability to ensure high availability and scalability to meet ever growing and sometimes spiking demand.
• Large or extremely large customer bases make personal contact with customers cost prohibitive.

The above operational factors make it critical to answer software product lifecycle management and related commercial questions such as:

• “Of all the products we have, what is the distribution of versions across installed user base?”
• “How many users have upgraded to the latest version and from what version did they come from?”
• “Do we have users with duplicate subscription entitlements?”
• “How many OEM users have been converted to customers and renew products?”
• “How many OEM users run expired client subscriptions?”
• “Of customers using expired client subscriptions, how many have paid for an upgrade or renewal and not activated?”

To answer these critical questions (and many like them), software vendors require a robust yet flexible way to capture enormous amounts of data from live applications running on customers computers, and correlate that data with information from their backend software product delivery infrastructure. Such systems are difficult to build in house when software product teams and IT operations staff already have tight schedules with their existing product development and support commitments.

The Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform is based on industry-leading event processing technologies designed for large scale, high performance data capture, correlation and analysis, visualization, and upstream publishing.

PLM is built from the ground up to include many attributes that are typically an afterthought in many enterprise applications. Together these features deliver industry-leading data analysis capability for effectively and efficiently operating in the complex scenarios found in software product businesses:

• Real-Time – Real-time acquisition and processing of information is essential for software product vendors to find out how beta or new product releases are performing in the real world.
• Extreme Scalability – Proven technology that can simultaneously acquire and track information from over 100 million in-field product installations.
• Geographic Redundancy – PLM can be geographically distributed to match product delivery infrastructure footprints, ensuring faster and more reliable responses to customers.
• Real time Data Visualization – Flexible, standards-based web dashboards and reports that deliver meaningful data to business users.
• Security – The security of end-user information is of utmost importance, and the quality of security is never compromised at any stage throughout the lifecycle of a product.
• Multi-Channel – Software products are able to communicate with the PLM on many different channels such as HTTP/S, TCP sockets and DNS, minimizing the chance of incorrect or irregular data.
• Processing Engine – PLM provides an advanced processing engine that is capable of tracking many objects and executing queries against real-time data streams and historical data using a simple rules-based language.

Outcomes

• Tracking early release/ beta testing product versions through customer acquisition, installation, and operation.
• Identifying active product version demographics via in field-update processes.
• Tracking product deployment and upgrade issues such as duplicate orders or incomplete upgrades.
• Offering integrated and holistic views of customer product experiences for support organizations.
• Detecting and modeling long-term trends for infrastructure and service management.
• Tracing product licensing allocations and preventing licensing infringements.
• Projecting support loads and lifetimes for in-field product deployments and future product iterations.

Overall Event Zero’s event processing network (EPN) platform offers significant advantages to software product organizations:

• Lower cost and faster time to delivery than internal, build-from-scratch product lifecycle monitoring infrastructures.
• Supports multiple different applications, and is independent of single business operations group control.

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