Floating / Concurrent Licensing

Software Potential includes support for advanced licensing scenarios like floating / concurrent software licensing in your application. Typical use cases for floating licenses include:

  • Where there is a high volume of possibly distributed clients / users and it is not practical to install licenses for each client instance.
  • Where you have multiple installed instances of a licensed application where the number of installed instances exceed the number of available licenses for the application
  • Web farm scenarios where the number of instances of the software can vary over time with performance and load factors.
  • Virtualised environments where secure license storage is not achievable e.g. ability to clone and/or rollback VMs etc.

The case for a floating license service, running locally (on-premise) but connected back to the central service is strong in these scenarios, in that it can facilitate the dynamic control of license allocation across multiple application instances while reducing the end customers’ license administration overhead.

Floating Licensing from Software Potential

Software Potential's floating license service enables support for any or all of the above scenarios with the additional benefit of central license administration. Our Floating Licensing service is implemented via a locally installed component called the Software Potential "Distributor" which introduces the concept of software license "leasing", whereby a license to use an application can be checked out or "leased" for a period of time, and then checked back in when the usage period expires, freeing up the lease for the next user / client.

The Distributor module provides seamless management of licenses across multiple application execution contexts such as machines, sessions etc. It comprises of the following elements:

  • Distributor Client DLL which is used by the SP Agent to connect to the Distributor Service
  • Distributor Service which is hosted as a Windows Service (Slps.Distributor.Host) on a network accessible machine.
  • An associated web front end that is served from within the same host process which allows one to administer the Distributor service and its associated licenses.

 For more information: