Software Feature Licensing
Our ULS (Universal Licensing System) is a highly automated, comprehensive license management solution supporting a wide variety of licensing requirements including cloud applications. Deployed for over 10 years, it is an online service for product suppliers like you and for your customers. Your customers can use ULS to manage the licenses they have purchased. Such licenses can range from simple product activation licenses to more complex ones such as licenses for feature activation and capacity control. ULS helps you optimize your product monetization by allowing product features to be licensed individually, and by offering your customers the flexibility to pay as they grow.
- Flexible product license control
- Diverse application scenarios
- Fine-grained user access control
- Powerful license credit management
- Secure license enforcement
- Highly available infrastructure
FLEXIBLE FEATURE ACTIVATION AND CAPACITY CONTROL
A ULS license can enable/disable individual product features and set the capacity limits on them. Both perpetual and term (i.e., subscription) licenses are supported. ULS can enforce license limits and dependencies and disallow incompatible combination of licenses. Licenses can be bound to a single device or software instance, a group of devices of the same type, or even a system comprising devices of diverse types. Licenses can be created for physical and software products, including cloud-hosted applications.
ULS has been supporting a host of products, including CPE and infrastructure equipment deployed by video service providers and telecom operators.
DIVERSE APPLICATION SCENARIOS
ULS supports a wide range of application scenarios, including low- and high-volume license provisioning in factories, individual product unit upgrade by customers, mass product rollout and upgrade, product repair and replacement, and more. Its license mobility support allows licenses to be moved from one product unit to another.
An intuitive web-based user interface provides users with an easy way of generating licenses on-demand, accessing previously generated licenses, viewing available license credits, and create various reports.
ULS features a REST API that allows product units to perform automated license operations. This API also enables third-party license managers to use ULS as their back-office licensing system.
FINE-GRAINED USER ACCESS CONTROL
ULS supports fine-grained control of user privileges. Different users can be given different access scopes based on the products they work with and their responsibilities. Users can be assigned one or more roles that grant them different privileges, including the ability to manage access scopes and roles of other users. User access to ULS is protected by multi-factor authentication.
POWERFUL LICENSE CREDIT MANAGEMENT
For license credit management, ULS provides integration points for suppliers’ order management system. Both pre- and post-paid licenses are supported, with detailed audit trails kept of all transactions.
License credits in ULS can be compartmented to align with the customer’s operational structure and can be moved across organizations to adapt to such changes as customer site consolidation, capacity relocation, mergers, and spinoffs.
Standard and custom reports keep product suppliers and their customers informed of licensing activities.
STRONG LICENSE SECURITY
ULS licenses are protected by strong cryptography, physically secure hardware, and secure operating procedures. Special safeguards are in place to defend against rollback attacks in license downgrade or deletion scenarios. ULS supports many license binding mechanisms, depending on product security capabilities, license values, and deployment scenarios. The ULS engineering team works closely with product suppliers to determine the appropriate level of license security for their products.
For ease of integration, an SDK is available to help product suppliers quickly get on board with ULS and incorporate licensing capabilities in their products.
High Availability
ULS is hosted on a reliable infrastructure that serves a global user base including more than 40 manufacturing and operator facilities around the world. This infrastructure is built on a state-of-the-art virtualization platform with built-in high-availability capability, supported by redundant network connections, hot stand-by backup power supply, and a remote disaster recovery site. The ULS system is monitored by several service health monitoring systems and a 24x7 network operations team, ensuring quick responses to any service issues.
