Eaton Growing Recurring Revenue Through Flexible Software Monetization Models

As a global intelligent power management company, Eaton is dedicated to improving the quality of life and protecting the environment for people everywhere through its industry-leading electrical, aerospace and vehicle products and services. By capitalizing on the global growth trends of electrification and digitalization, Eaton is accelerating the planet’s transition to renewable energy and helping to solve the world’s most urgent power management challenges.

In addition to traditional devices and products to support power infrastructure, Eaton has created Brightlayer, a digital foundation for hardware, software and services that provides customers with data and insights for their connectable electrical assets and infrastructure. 

Brightlayer software includes:

• Applications for electrical power monitoring, infrastructure management and asset performance management 
• Analytics and insights to monitor and predict state of health in motors and electrical equipment
• APIs that enable customers and their partners to interface with Eaton’s solutions in order to create connected ecosystems

Eaton had a mix of homegrown and other licensing technology that resulted in friction and operational inefficiencies in its go-to-market. They aimed to transition from this model to a corporate standard for software monetization in order to increase recurring revenue through adaptable software models, optimize software operations and satisfy the needs and expectations of end customers.

Historically at Eaton, some software was monetized and required entitlements to use, while others were offered free as part of a larger hardware purchase. In addition to existing on-premise and embedded software, Eaton also wanted to explore usage-based models and monetize emerging SaaS offerings that underpinned its digital growth strategy. There was also variability in the way different products tied into the order management system, so the company required alignment to an enterprise standard for software monetization and integration with quote-to-cash processes. It was important that the company could rapidly monetize new products with a standard licensing infrastructure without having to build it from scratch each time to accelerate the time-to-market.

Eaton also wanted self-service portals for customers to make the process of managing entitlements even easier and to support more complex reselling models. Finally, Eaton recognized the power of product usage data to give customers insights to fuel their own business decisions and for the company to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Eaton implemented Revenera’s Software Monetization solutions, including Entitlement Management and Software Licensing to centralize its platform management for licensing. It is achieving efficiencies and savings by streamlining software operations across multiple divisions and systems. With Eaton’s use of Revenera as a standard enterprise platform, it was able to build capabilities to improve its front-end experience for digital offers. With Revenera supported products, end customers now have a standardized experience regardless of which offers they own. 

“The ability to rapidly include entitlements for our new offerings without having to build it from scratch each time is a tremendous benefit for our business and for our customers. We’re able to bring new offerings to market more quickly while our customers enjoy a unified and consistent experience that makes it easy to get up and running,” said Mark Roces, vice-president, Digital Offer Management at Eaton. “Additionally, Eaton is better able to track the transfer of control of software to the customer, reduce manual processes and automate billing processes.”

Eaton now has visibility into entitlement data to track renewals and notify customers before the end of a term to improve retention rates and customers have visibility to the subscriptions they have purchased. Channel partners also have visibility to the subscriptions they have sold, providing greater opportunities to influence renewals.

In addition to gaining more control over both the provisioning process and interaction with the licensing technology used in its software products, Eaton is now able to quickly pivot to new license and monetization models as the business requires. “We’re in a better position to focus our software development resources on the functionality our customers need and deliver on our product roadmaps. In the same way our customers rely on our industry expertise to make them successful, we are leveraging the Revenera platform to support our ability to implement new software monetization models and sell software the way our customers want to buy it,” said Roces.