Project Description

SmartLM – Grid-friendly software licensing for location independent application execution

Period: 2008-02-01 – 2010-09-30 (30 months).

Funded by: Comisión Europea

Current software licensing practices are limiting the acceleration of Grid adoption. Indeed, the rapid emergence of service and virtualization environments requires a rapid evolution in licensing models. SmartLM will provide a generic and flexible licensing virtualization technology for new service-oriented business models across organization boundaries.

The development of a Grid-aware software licensing integrated into service-oriented architectures (SOA) will significantly bolster grid deployment generally – but specially into new areas exploiting a broad range of commercial software, beyond boundaries of technical computing and high performance computing.

The ability to effectively and dynamically manage the use of software licenses based on business objectives is not a grid-only issue, but grids are an important inflection point in this transformation.

It is with clarity that SmartLM is aiming to aid the creation of new industrial opportunities based on the creation of the emerging Service market that uses the service-oriented infrastructure as a means to deliver new software services in great many fields like Finance, Entertainment, Retail, Pharma, etc.

SmartLM will contribute to the technology convergence (virtualization, Grid, SOA, etc) -and large interoperability objective with focused contributions to WS standards and specifications at the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

The open nature of the new license management software will enable distributed applications by solving one of the major shortcuts for its deployment. Well-known applications can be adapted to this new multinomial networked environment, helping organizations to get dynamic access to the right of usage applications. This will support not only large enterprises but also Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) who do not have the negotiating power to obtain non-standard pricing or licensing from ISVs.

The challenge is to compensate the potential revenue loss on one side with greater business values on the other side. Customer needs and vendor requirements must be balanced.

Partners:

  • Atos Origin
  • Fraunhofer SCAI
  • FZJ
  • CINECA
  • 451 Group
  • INTES
  • ANSYS
  • LMS
  • T-Systems
  • CESGA
  • Gridcore

Publications:

[1] David García Pérez, José Carlos Mouriño Gallego and Andrés Gómez Tato. Accounting and Billing of Software Licenses. IBERGRID 2010. Braga (Portugal), 2010.