Dear Software Business Professionals,

I wanted to take a minute to let all of you know that we are making some exciting improvements to Microsoft^® Software Licensing and Protection (SLP) Services starting July 8th 2008. Our product has been in the market since last October, and in that time we’ve generated a lot of customer excitement. We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from ISVs over the last 9 months that even more of them would like to take advantage of our service, so we are taking specific actions to address our customer concerns.

One of our themes at the Worldwide Partner Conference July 8th is "You spoke, we listened." We hope that the following enhancements will allow a wider variety of ISVs to use SLP Services to easily and cost effectively protect licenses and sensitive code, easily create flexible and interesting new business models, and integrate a powerful software licensing system into their businesses.

New Service Pricing. We heard from several smaller ISVs that while our offering was compelling, it was just too expensive for them to use. Our market research has also shown that over two thirds of current software licensing solutions are “homegrown” which tells us that it has just been cheaper to build rather than buy a software licensing solution. Therefore we are announcing that ISVs will be able to use our full-featured online service to uniquely transform unlimited functions and create licenses for unlimited products for the new low price of $10.00 per month.

New Activation Payment Model. We also heard that purchasing activation packs ahead of time was troublesome because it is difficult to predict how many end users will activate or when. So we are changing our model to charge only after the end user uses activation. Customers will now receive monthly statements that show exactly how many activations have occurred for each product SKU over the previous month, what discounts have been applied, and customers will have multiple options for payment.

Instead of a flat pricing model, we have created a new tiered model based on the average price of the application – activations for lower priced applications cost less than activations for more expensive software. Activation prices start at $.25 for applications that cost $20 or less, and we will continue to offer trial activations for just $0.01. Finally, we have introduced an additional volume discount which can add up to 50% more in savings for certain ISVs who have large numbers of activations.

Simplified SKUs. Previously our SKUs were defined by how many functions could be protected, how many products could be licensed, and how many activations came with the SLP Services. To simplify things, we have taken all the functionality we currently have and created SLP Online Service Standard. For ISVs that want to host their own SLP Servers, we will continue to sell SLP Server 2008, and have included unlimited server deployments for no additional cost. All of our SKUs can be purchased online directly from Microsoft, or through any of our Value Added Reseller (VAR) partners.

New Functionality. Today we are also announcing that in October we will release the SLP Online Service Professional SKU, which will include new APIs that enable robust back-end business integration solutions. Our new CRM API and Dynamic Licensing API will allow even a small software company to easily enable scenarios where keys and licenses are automatically created based on a customer request for certain SKUs, and CRM systems can process and report on all licensing details and activity. We have also spent a lot of time creating a new user experience for the License Design Portal that will make it even easier to quickly create simple try and buy scenarios, or a monthly subscription model that charges based on actual usage of certain features.

Current Customers. If you are an active subscriber of SLP Services or use our Code Protection solution you have the choice to either continue with your current subscription or upgrade to our new offerings. Please work with your reseller to explore your best options.

We hope that our lower barrier to entry, improved functionality, and overall simplification of our model encourages more companies in the software industry to take the opportunity to upgrade their current licensing and protection systems and take their businesses to a new level.

SLP Service and Server evaluations, tutorials, white papers, and customer case studies can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/slps. And as always, we encourage you to provide feedback on our forums or directly to slpsinfo@microsoft.com.

Sincerely,



Thomas Lindeman
Director of Marketing
SLP Services
Microsoft Corporation