This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Neil Fenton, the Executive Chairman of
10Duke. We discussed the services they offer, how has Covid outbreak affected their business, and how Neil envisions the future of the industry.
Please present 10Duke to our audience?
10Duke provides an advanced licensing solution to fast-growing Independent Software Vendors to better enable them to easily configure, grant, and manage the licenses they sell to their customers.
What services do you offer?
10Duke offers a combined customer identity management and license management solution. For an ISV’s customers, their email address in effect becomes their license key.
The entire license grant, fulfillment, and enforcement aspects of licensing are all combined into one simple user action, which basically makes licensing disappear from the end user’s perspective.
All they have to do is log in to the application they are using and that’s it – if they have a valid license, they’ll be good to go.
What separates you from other similar websites/companies?
In the license management space, several things:
1) We are the only vendor offering combined identity management and license management solution in one.
2) We offer out-of-the-box integrations to a variety of other business tools that an ISV will typically need to use, like CRM, eCommerce, and/or payment provider.
3) We are a cloud-native solution and our entire licensing engine is easily accessed via REST APIs.
4) We support licensing for desktop, web, and mobile applications as well as for devices, APIs, and virtual machines, all with the same engine.
How do you envision the future of your industry?
License management is hard to do for most ISVs as it is complex, but it is nevertheless a critical aspect of any business that writes, publishes, and sells software.
As a vendor, we see a huge opportunity to take away a lot of this burden for ISVs so that license management becomes simple and straightforward to do and for the license management system to also integrate seamlessly with other business systems such as CRM and eCommerce.
Which trends and technologies do you find to be particularly intriguing these days?
The use of cloud services and the ease with which you can now write and deploy extremely complex workloads to services like AWS or Azure with relative ease. This continuing trend is putting more and more power into the hands of every ISV to allow them to develop more capable software services than ever before.
How has COVID impacted your customers and business?
We’ve been lucky in that our customer base is made up of other ISVs which write and sell digital products, so in general, their businesses have been largely insulated from COVID, apart from the work from home aspects but otherwise, it has pretty much been business as usual.
