This is an interesting software licensing case study.

SoftCafe are a great example of how an ISV can succeed by really understanding a niche market. The company was founded in 1994 and was the first company to produce one click menu software for the catering industry.  Now, with a whole suite of easy to use software designed specifically for the catering industry 1,000’s of café’s and restaurants depend on Softcafe products to run their businesses every day.

When the business started growing and founder Scott Tyburski looked into improving their copy protection and software licensing arrangements, like many ISV’s he did initially consider going the “do-it-yourself” route.

DIY copy protection is something that is a huge temptation for many software startups.  They have the coding skills in house, they know exactly what they want and writing their own copy protection program will save them money, right?

Scott came quickly to a realization that takes some ISV’s long and costly years to arrive at:

Being a small software company, we did indeed consider writing our own piracy protection and hosting our own code database.  But we quickly realized that going this route would be a distraction from our core business.  The exercise would probably end up eating huge amounts of time, both in the initial development and the ongoing support. We would be “reinventing the wheel” and in all likelihood any solution we devised ourselves wouldn’t match up to what is already available on the market.

In selecting a software licensing provider Scott was looking for ironclad security, flexibility and ease of use, for both Softcafe and their end users:

At SoftCafe we take pride in delivering bug-free code and an easy-to-use end-user experience, and we wouldn’t trust the keys to that software to anyone other than Nalpeiron.

The case study is a good illustration of some of the reasons why it may be better for ISV’s to avoid the temptation of going DIY when it comes to software licensing and copy protection.

You can read the full story here.

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