V.i. Labs
News & Views

August, 2008 - Vol 1, Issue 8
In This Issue
New Product: CodeArmor Intelligence
Customer Case Study
CodeArmor Intelligence In the News
Piracy Research Update: Time-to-Crack
On Demand Webinar: Software Piracy Strategies
Best Intellectual Property Protection
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Greetings!
Welcome to the August issue of V.i. Labs News & Views. If you thought last month's issue had some great articles, read on to learn about our newest product, CodeArmor Intelligence, a new piracy case study featuring a large PLM vendor, and an update to our piracy research from last month.
CodeArmor Intelligence:
Quantify Piracy and Recover License Revenue
 
CodeArmor Intelligence

On August 20, we announced CodeArmor® Intelligence. This new product enables ISVs to combat piracy and recover lost revenue by collecting forensic evidence of infringement from the businesses that are actually using the pirated software.

Software protection is one form of defense for ISVs. But for some ISVs, the lack of data, complexity in their customer base, product maturity, and market dynamics may require a detection, reporting and lead generation strategy to recover license revenue.
 
CodeArmor Intelligence provides a product approach that can be easily integrated into applications to detect piracy threats, centrally gather forensic data, and create piracy leads to support sales and legal efforts to recover revenue.
 
"The EDA software industry in particular has been challenged to measure the true piracy loss for its software. Piracy effects more than license revenue. It can have significant ripple effects because the use of pirated software greatly reduces the cost of created electronic devices," said Scott Baeder, Anti-Piracy Committee Chairman, Electronic Design Automation Consortium. "The CodeArmor Intelligence solution is very important since it can give software vendors a way to generate concrete evidence of unauthorized use and reduce the revenue loss attributed to piracy." 
 
Customer Case Study:
Large PLM Vendor Chooses CodeArmor Intelligence to Quantify Piracy and Generate Leads to Recover Revenue
Background:
This company is a leader in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and CAD/CAM/CAE software solutions, has over 35,000 customers worldwide, and product revenues approaching $700M a year.

Challenges:
The company was aware that its mature product line was being pirated. Previous major releases had been cracked and were widely available on the pirate scene.Yet it did not know to what extent and how much it was being used by actual organizations they could recover revenue from.

Solution:
The company selected V.i. Labs as its partner to implement piracy detection and reporting into its major product line and provide additional piracy analysis services. It selected V.i. Labs' CodeArmor Intelligence solution because of the ease in which it could be integrated into current products, its ability to stealthily report data, and the fact that it provided a turnkey system to meet their detection, data collection, and reporting requirements.
 
Because the solution only triggers reporting when a tampered version of the software is actually used, the CodeArmor Intelligence process minimizes any impact to their existing licensed customer base.
 
CodeArmor Intelligence In the News
 
"[Forrester's Chenxi] Wang thinks that CodeArmor Intelligence's data can give ISVs the leverage to help turn a pirating company, if approached correctly, into a paying end-user, and ultimately a loyal customer."
"V.i. Laboratories has developed anti-piracy software that detects when a software product is being illegally used and reports that usage back to its developer, providing independent software vendors and their channel partners a way to recover lost revenue."
 
"Infringement data from the product can be used to create a lead that can be followed up by a company's legal or sales team."
Piracy Research Update
Time-To-CrackAs a follow-on to our previous piracy analysis, we announced new data on the Time to Crack (TTC) for vendors in the PLM industry. We started with the PLM software, and will expand our research with the TTC estimates for the EDA industry.

The announcement and our TTC metric is meant to help educate and define the piracy problem for these specific industries. The TTC metric has to be measured and established before organizations can decide on an anti-piracy strategy and programs. We define TTC as the point in time where the piracy groups have made available a quality crack release that mirrors the actual vendor software release, but has its license management or activation process disabled or bypassed to enable illegal use.

Read more
On Demand Webinar:
Software Piracy Strategies - Targeting Unlicensed Customers and Lost Revenue
 
SIIA 
 
 
Featuring Keith Kupferschmid, SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement, Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA)

Corporations are pirating your software to build their businesses. The latest trends point to businesses using pirated software to design and build products. If you still think that software pirates live in dorm rooms or their parents' basements, you'll be surprised to learn that the average infringing organization has annual sales of $17 million.

This Webcast goes behind the scenes of software piracy to reveal how corporations are using unlicensed software at your expense. It also provides an overview of strategies, best practices, and specific recommendations on how to identify these companies and convert them into paying customers - including how the piracy channel itself can be leveraged with technology solutions to generate leads.

Watch this Webcast and learn about:

  • How to determine if piracy is a problem for your company
  • How to choose the best anti-piracy strategy for your company - prevention vs. lead generation
  • How to recover revenue from corporate pirates (average revenue recovered can range from $500k to $3M)
  • What the average infringing business looks like, why they are using pirated software, and how it gets there 
 
Thanks for Voting for CodeArmor!
 
Network Product Guide - 2008 AwardThanks to your votes, CodeArmor has won Network Products Guide's "Best Products and Services" in the Intellectual Property Protection category!
 
 
Thanks for reading this month's newsletter. As you can tell, we've been busy this summer. Please let us know if you'd like a demo of CodeArmor Intelligence - we're excited to finally be able to share our latest product with you!
 
Regards,
 
Michael Goff
V.i. Labs
 
©2008 V.i. Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. V.i. Labs, CodeArmor and the V.i. Labs logo, are trademarks of V.i. Laboratories, Inc. All other product and brand names herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.