Sentinel EMS Features
Centralized License Management Interface
Sentinel EMS enables you to improve license lifecycle management capabilities, reduce support costs, and enhance the end user experience by offering a centralized license management interface for employees, partners, and end users.
>Role-Based Vendor Portal—Easily create, implement, and manage vendor users, roles, and privileges that will enable customer service, sales, marketing, fulfillment, and product management employees to use a single system to improve customer relations and product life cycle management.
>Support for Channel Partners—Empower your channel partners by granting them the ability to distribute entitlements of your product offering. Sentinel EMS provides the ability to track and bill your channel partners based on their consumption.
>Self-Service Customer Portal for End Users—Reduce support costs and enhance the user experience by enabling end users to automatically purchase, activate, renew, and return products without needing to contact your customer support team.
A Complete Enterprise Software Licensing and Management Solution
Combining Sentinel EMS with
Sentinel RMS Enforcement
Sentinel RMS provides support for any desired license model from single seat, concurrent, lease, and metered to service-oriented models. Sentinel RMS is designed to manage features and capabilities in hardware systems as well as corporate network applications and is deployed by some of the industry’s largest enterprise software vendors and equipment manufacturers.
Sentinel Cloud-connected licensing (SCL) is an add-on for Sentinel RMS and is used in conjunction with Sentinel EMS to support leased licenses.
Sentinel LDK Enforcement
Sentinel LDK is Thales’s industry-leading software protection and licensing solution. It provides cutting edge security technologies for the utmost in copy protection, a range of license models and entitlement fulfillment options, and out-of-the-box tools that facilitate quick integration and deployment. supports hardware-, software- and cloud-based licensing and includes a range of APIs to allow software vendors to automate and tailor the implementation to their unique business requirements.
Sentinel Fit Enforcement
Sentinel Fit is a light-weight licensing solution that is intended for use with embedded devices. The Sentinel Fit runtime has an extremely small footprint and is limited to the minimal features that are required for a licensing system that runs on embedded devices.
Integrating Sentinel Fit enforcement into Sentinel EMS lets you leverage Sentinel Fit strengths so you can:
>Incorporate an ultra-small licensing footprint into your products.
>Take advantage of high portability using the Sentinel Fit SDK, which is suitable for development on all device platforms.
>Use Sentinel Fit's modular architecture to create an optimal balance between footprint and device functionality.
Services Enforcement
The Services enforcement provides software vendors a mechanism for tracking products that do not require product-level enforcement, such as maintenance, support, training, professional services, and hardware products. Services license models can be provisioned on their own as an enforcement, or they can be provisioned along with any of the other enforcements, such as
Third-Party Enforcement
A home-grown or third-party license enforcement can be plugged in to Sentinel EMS to provide a complete license management solution. For information on configuring Sentinel EMS for third-party enforcements, see Common Enforcement Properties.
Simplification of Licensing and Fulfillment Functions
Sentinel EMS enables you to simplify manual, time-consuming operational, compliance, and reporting functions throughout the entire license lifecycle. Automation of licensing fulfillment, activation, and management processes enables you to maximize profitability and improve business operations.
>License Fulfillment & Delivery Automation – Minimize time-consuming manual data entry and tracking functions to eliminate errors, save time, and reduce fulfillment costs by automating licensing and entitlement functions.
>Quick & Easy Product Configuration—Reduce development and inventory costs while shortening time to market by enabling fulfillment teams, customers, and channel partners to quickly and easily build and deploy new product packages and license models without involving IT or engineering.
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Versionless Entitlements—Enable vendors to simplify the selling process by creating versionless products and entitlements. With a single versionless entitlement, users can activate any available product version within the overall quantity limit of the entitlement. This avoids Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) explosions in upstream Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) systems and also offers a future-proof mechanism for licensing your products, without sacrificing backward compatibility.
Advantages
•Reduces SKU explosions in upstream systems.
•Enables you to provide new product versions to customers, without having to create new entitlements.
•Enables users to activate any available version.
•Enforces total entitlement quantity regardless of the version activated.
•Enables an older version to be available to maintain backward compatibility.
•Future-proof your product by having an option to add more features or versions, without requiring new entitlement.
•Provides an option to modify a version for new feature inclusion.
•Versionless entitlements enables easier product upgrades.
>Decoupled Entitlement Creation & Activation Functions—You can decouple entitlement management from software development functions. An order taker can directly create entitlements without any dependency on the development team.
>Batch Entitlement Creation—With Sentinel EMS, you can create entitlements as a batch. The process involves creating a single entitlement in draft state and then configuring it to be generated as a batch by specifying the quantity to be generated. This feature enables you to create large batches of entitlements eliminating the need for small, and low-volume production cycles. For details, see Configuring a Batch Entitlement.
Data Collection & Reporting
Sentinel EMS enables more effective product marketing, sales, and management by providing data collection and reporting features that allow you to more accurately forecast your renewal, upgrade, and budgeting figures, as well as determine how products are being deployed and used.
Options to collect user registration data, track entitlements, and monitor activation trends not only improve the efficacy and ROI of sales, marketing, and product management, but also provide software vendors with direct access to the end users who activate and use the product.
Usage collection, aggregation, and reporting tools provide the additional capability to process data and turn it into invaluable intelligence that can fuel business decisions and ensure compliance and customer satisfaction.
Sentinel RMS-specific reports:
>Simple End User Compliance Reporting—Improve the customer experience with straightforward entitlement tracking and reporting tools that enable end users to easily ensure they are not inadvertently exceeding paid license usage.
>End User Data Collection—Sentinel EMS enables you to identify and gain direct access to every individual who activates a copy of their software application with optional, fully customizable end user registration data collection. Traditionally software vendors have had limited or no access to the end users of their products, with their most commonly known users being in purchasing or IT. With Sentinel EMS software vendors can now require end users to complete a registration step prior to product activation. Fully customizable, this feature of Sentinel EMS enables software vendors to determine what information to collect from end users such as title, location, email address, and much more in order to improve marketing, sales, and customer care efforts.
>Usage Billing—Simplifies the process of collecting usage data, which can be utilized for bill generation. The collected usage data can be aggregated according to business rules and can be exported to third-party billing engines for generating bills.
>Customizable License Tracking & Reporting—Increase the value of every customer and reduce operating costs by improving support, marketing, and sales effort throughout the product life-cycle with flexible usage tracking and reporting tools.
>Business Intelligence—Leverage the system to identify, test, and implement new and more effective packaging, pricing, and distribution models to reach new markets and maximize revenue.
Cloud Served and Cloud Connected Licenses
Sentinel EMS supports Sentinel RMS as the default enforcement technology. SCL is an add-on for Sentinel RMS and is used in conjunction with Sentinel EMS to support Cloud Served (also known as leased licenses) and cloud connected licenses. Sentinel EMS provides support for cloud served licenses that need to be renewed at frequent intervals by connecting to a cloud server. Sentinel EMS also provides support for cloud connected licenses, which are pure cloud licenses. This means that the cloud connected licenses are distributed and consumed using SCL. Since license distribution is managed from cloud, you have a better control over the Cloud Served and Connected licenses delivered in field. The major benefits of Cloud Served and Connected licenses are:
>Dynamic provisioning and updates—You can reconfigure licenses in real time and secure updates can be delivered to customer at any instant. Updated offerings are immediately available, decreasing time to market.
>Usage Collection—Vendors can collect usage data that offers insights into the customer's usage patterns. Usage data enables vendors to offer usage-based business model and streamline their business investments.
>Scalability and product catalog remodeling—You can modify the features and business models based on dynamic market feedback whenever you wish to, and allow customers to buy more features or products, instantly.
>Reduce churn rate—It is the risk of losing customers due to high price but low software utilization. You can eliminate the unnecessary cost of licensing software that is under-used thus increasing customer satisfaction.
For more information on SCL, refer to the Sentinel Software and Services Solution Guide.
Data Import and Export
Sentinel EMS enables vendor users with an admin role in Sentinel EMS to import external customers, users, features, products, entitlements, and download data.
You can import data in CSV or JSON format. You can export existing customers, users, features, products, entitlements, and download information in JSON format.
Appropriate logging and error reporting is provided to ensure that you can identify discrepancies and take action for errors.
Enhanced Notification
Sentinel EMS provides options to define rules for sending email notifications to customers, users, and registered users (users that registered via the Sentinel EMS customer portal). Rules have been provided to define a notification. You can customize an email notification based on rules and send the email notification to recipients. The subject and content of the notification email are determined by the rule that defines the notification. You can configure the system to notify you or your end users when a product upgrade is available, when entitlements are about to expire, or when a feature is not being used.
Support for Electronic Software Delivery
Sentinel EMS provides support for Electronic Software Delivery (ESD), which is a solution that enables users to download software products over the Internet. Electronic delivery costs only a fraction of the cost of physical media delivery due to the elimination of shipping and storage costs.
Sentinel EMS provides a mechanism for management and fulfillment of software via electronic delivery.
Flexible System Integration
Sentinel EMS is designed to support any licensing system. Sentinel EMS provides you with a means to centrally manage disparate licensing systems and offers a single interface for your employees, channel partners, and end users for managing software licenses.
>Back Office Integration Options—Reduce or eliminate costly and time-consuming manual processes by integrating directly with your ERP and CRM system or by leveraging a modern inter-system communication implementation like an ESB.
>Agnostic License Generator Design—Simplify the fulfillment processes and ease the pain of complex mergers and acquisitions with a single management system for all your license generators and enforcement technologies.
Device-Friendly Name
Device Name in Sentinel EMS is the friendly representation of the locking information of a device. You can assign a device
Sentinel EMS allows you to enable device locking. For details, see the Administration Console.
License Revocation
You can revoke licenses if required, for instance, in the event of customer’s non-compliance with usage terms, customer’s willingness to return unused licenses, or transferring licenses from one customer to another. For details, see Actions for Activations.
Sentinel Professional Services and Technical Support
The Thales Professional Services team is available to help you plan for and implement Sentinel EMS, allowing you to fully realize its benefits in an optimal time frame. The Thales Technical Services organization provides worldwide telephone, email, and Internet-based support to our customers. Our Thales Service Guarantee ensures that you consistently receive the highest level of service.