by Maureen Polte, Director, Product Management, Flexera Software presented at SoftSummit 2010

1. Turning Customer Usage
Data into Valuable
Business Intelligence
Maureen Polte
Director, Product Management

2. Today’s Discussion
The InstallShield business leverages customer and product usage data to gain
valuable insight and provide business intelligence to drive product decisions,
marketing programs, and compliance initiatives resulting in increased revenue and
customer satisfaction.
Specifically, we’ll discuss the unique ways InstallShield uses FlexNet Connect to:
• Manage key phases of the product lifecycle
• Support compliance processes
2

3. Using Usage Data To Manage The Product Lifecycle
1. Are users adopting the latest release?
• Beyond purchasing or downloading, are my customers using the latest
release?
2. How successful was our last End of Life program?
• Both marketing and product management receive value in understanding
migration success
3. Can we drop support for an operating system?
• No need to rely purely on 3rd party analyst reports
4. Which features should I enhance or remove?
• Customer Experience Improvement Programs are easy to implement
5. Product Updates
• How many users actually installed the update?
6. Customer Announcements
• Deliver marketing and general product messages directly to the user

4. 5,000
15,000
20,000
25,000
30,000
10,000
0
10-07
11-07
12-07
1-08
2-08
3-08
4-08
5-08
6-08
7-08
8-08
9-08
10-08
11-08
12-08
1-09
2-09
3-09
4-09
5-09
6-09
7-09
8-09
9-09
10-09
11-09
Adoption Rate For A New Release
12-09
1-10
2-10
3-10
4-10
5-10
6-10
7-10
IS 7
IS 8
IS 9
IS 10
IS 11
IS 12
Pro 6
Pro 7
IS 10.5
IS 11.5
IS2010
IS 2008
IS 2009

5. How Many Users Are We Impacting With
End of Life Decisions
InstallShield 2008 End of Life
Announcement (Added InstallShield
12 to the Promotion)

6. Usage Data improves New Product Launch monitoring
16,000 Registrations - 15,000 Download - 8,155 Activated this “Freemium” product
6

7. Can We Drop Support for Windows Server 2003?

8. Easily Implement Customer Experience Improvement
Programs To Support Feature Management
Where should I invest engineering dollars?
View Name % of Visits Total Users
viewISToday 12% 213
viewAssistant 8% 171
viewInstallScriptStd 8% 114
viewOrganizeYourSetup 9% 151
viewSetupDesign 6% 132
viewSetupComponents 5% 123
viewProject 5% 124
viewAppFiles 5% 128
viewSetupFeatures 3% 110
viewCustomActions 3% 58
viewRelease 3% 91

9. How Many Users Installed The Update?
InstallShield 2010 SP1 – All Editions

10. Marketing Messages – Delivered Directly To The
User
End of Life “Amnesty” Promotional message to
InstallShield 12 Users

11. Using Usage Data To Support Compliance Processes
1. Should I give a customer another activation?
• Activation History doesn’t tell the whole story. Allow (or don’t allow) additional
activations with “peace of mind”
2. Take discussions about denied activations to a business level
• Being able to correlate license activation and usage improves the compliance
dialog with your customer
3. Proactively engage with customers about how they are using the software
• How many users? How often? Maybe a different licensing model is a better
fit

12. Activation Denied—Customer Wanted Another
Activation—Serial Number Was Not In Use
It had been almost 2 years since this SN was last
activated. Our policy is typically to grant another
activation... We checked the usage data for this SN
first.

13. But Someone Is Using It…
Fairly consistently
since January

14. When Activation History Is Long…How Do You
Make The Right Decision?
14

15. Usage Data Allowed Us To Have A More Balanced
Discussion

16. Activation Looks OK but Usage Indicates a
Compliance Issue
16

17. Proactive Reporting Allows Sales to Target
Customers Who Would Benefit From Concurrent
Licensing
17

18. Questions?