F9’s New License Model is Built for the Cloud

PROVIDING MORE FLEXIBILITY AND OPTIONS TO CUSTOMERS

F9, an independent business unit of Infor, provides comprehensive financial reporting and analytics. Their robust financial solution streamlines reporting, linking Microsoft Excel® with enterprise organizations. F9 provides speed, flexibility and ease of use to more than 35,000 customers and over 150 ERPs.

F9 was limited by a legacy licensing solution that was not evolving with their needs and didn’t deliver the customer experience they desired. With an eye to the future they determined a new solution was needed, based on key business drivers:

New monetization and deployment models. A growing number of F9’s ERP solutions have moved to SaaS. Consistent with this, support for subscription licensing was a high priority.

Customer growth. The ability to offer new pricing and functionality within their next major release was required, allowing F9 to strengthen their competitive position.

Better visibility. F9 needed a clear view of who was purchasing, activating and reactivating licenses, a capability that was difficult to implement in their legacy solution. Tracking users and the devices F9 was running on was challenging to support. 

Improved Customer Experience. A reliable and user-friendly customer portal was required to allow self-activation and reduce license-related support issues. Providing a more transparent licensing interface would be beneficial to both our customers and ERP partners.

SOLUTION

Engineering teams from F9 and Revenera collaborated closely to rapidly implement Revenera’s Software Monetization solutions, including Entitlement Management and Software Licensing. F9’s new monetization system helps their customers by giving them control over their license activities. Customers can easily move from trial to paid licenses, and even deactivate and reactivate as needed. F9 as well as their ERP Partners now have a more detailed view of these activities than was possible with their legacy solution. 

BUSINESS OUTLOOK

With the Revenera solution, Infor F9 now has an automated end-to-end monetization platform that is centralized and has resulted in reduced complexity and costs for back office administration.

F9 has a quantified view of product usage and has seen reductions in the time needed to resolve licensing issues. F9 can look to recapture lost revenues that resulted from limitations of the older licensing and device usage accuracy.

Their Infor-branded customer and partner portals are delivering new self-service and license management capabilities. ERP partners are very pleased with the new portal; they can login and view their customers’ usage data and foresee significantly less licensing support issues. With the new SaaS licensing option, customers can opt to purchase F9 for a fixed term, which fits well for hosting.

F9 has successfully completed the new release rollout across its 17 core products with plans to retire its legacy license model and migrate the older version of products to the new licensing platform