Steinberg's new licensing system: An interview with Ben Timms

Yes, it was possibly one of the broadest projects Steinberg has undertaken, affecting all our software products and requiring changes to a wide range of our business processes. The reason we undertook the challenge was that the technical foundation of the eLicenser system was creaking at the seams during product launches and wasn't well suited to our future direction of an identity-based licensing system. Furthermore, the USB dongle is really something we had to move on from in the 21st century for many reasons like the fact our creative users are often on the move on laptops, and reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing, shipping and end-of-life of an unnecessary electronic plastic-encased thing.

One immediate benefit is our increased flexibility to allow users to activate a single-user license on up to three computers. The strong link to our customers identity also safeguards their licenses in a way that the eLicenser didn't and paves the way for new possibilities with more flexible licensing models for schools, businesses and other institutions.

Yes, HALion will be the next major product to switch to Steinberg Licensing as the primary licensing system. The challenge with the instrument portfolio is providing as much backward compatibility as we can because it's impractical to rebuild all our previously released products to retrofit the new licensing system. We have a new mechanism for trading in existing eLicenser licenses for their equivalent (WaveLab 11.1 was the first product to make use of this within the lifecycle of a major version) and are looking at how feasible it would be to do the same for some of our back-catalogue of content.

This topic was discussed a lot when we decided to switch to a software-based licensing system and comes up again from time to time. However, by introducing new Steinberg Licensing, we were determined to move toward offering a more service-orientated user experience, where paying customers clearly benefit from our full range of services, such as tech support, even if that meant placing less emphasis on our anti-piracy measures. A progressive way of looking at this is that users who wouldn't have paid for software previously now have an entry point into our ecosystem and are more likely to become valued customers in the future.

It may be worth pointing out that the use of pirated software entails many risks, legally, ethically, and technically. I would like to believe that the savvy user will want to stay away from these dangers.

We're grateful to our eLicenser partners over the years for their business and have been in contact with anyone who licensed eLicenser to inform them of the sunsetting of the technology. Each vendor will decide for themselves as to how they wish to manage their licenses in the future. We have built up a good stock of hardware eLicensers but won't be placing any future orders for the chips that power them. We will continue to run the back-end eLicenser servers for as long as it's feasible to do so, but strongly encourage all our users to switch to products using our new licensing system where possible.

In general, our users are really pleased that they can start to move their licenses off the dongle and into a more flexible identity-based account. The fact that you can activate on three computers reduces the need for mechanisms like "zero down-time" and we're regularly reviewing our policies based on the feedback we get on the forums and our support channels.

Like any transition, there's often a peak of support requests as users get accustomed with the new system, but our support team are on-board with our vision of consolidating a range of our older systems to bring all the tools to help customers into a single view linked to the Steinberg ID.

One of the most pleasing moments of the entire project was when Matthias, the Product Marketing Manager for Cubase, could finally realise his vision of a dongle-less Cubase Pro trial. It's a huge step forward for us and makes complete sense in this digital-first age.

As more of our ecosystem of products make the transition to Steinberg Licensing and we build on that foundation to streamline the downloading, installing and activating our software, we can make our tools more easily accessible to everyone.

While it's true that we're using a third-party vendor to run the server-side part of our licensing system, we've still invested heavily from our internal teams to package up the functions of the licensing platform in a way that makes sense for our applications, plug-ins and content. It's taken a huge effort across the business to build new tools for users, adapt our products, interface to our existing systems and business process. Looking forward, we have ambitions for adding refinement to the mechanisms underlying the new technology as well as providing greater flexibility for our customers, so further development will continue in the foreseeable future. Overall, the idea behind new Steinberg Licensing is to make it even easier for customers to access our creative tools in the way that makes sense to them both technically and financially.