Licensing Flexibility

Alibre wanted a solution that they could rely on when integrated with their systems such as Salesforce, and that could empower them to use a variety of licensing options on top of the regular ones they would use, including floating licenses, licensing on networks, and offline.

• Had used home grown licensing and Flexera
• Wanted to modernize
• Needed licensing that they could drive from Salesforce

Case Study

Alibre was born in the late 90s and produces 3D CAD Software for use in mechanical design. Ahead of its time and forward thinking, Alibre was looking at design from the perspective of teams collaborating online on projects and went on to develop leading parametric 3D CAD solutions for product design. Alibre has a full set of tools for 3D design, sheet metal modeling, creating assemblies, and 2D drawings.

Alibre’s design software (Alibre Design) is used for manufacturing processes, as well as for the exciting world of 3D Printers, CNC machining, and their output.

The company for a long time used its own home developed licensing system, before moving to Flexera, but in recent years they were looking to modernize and ultimately made the switch to Zentitle by Nalpeiron, a true cloud-based licensing solution.

Zentitle has since been adopted by the company across all its product lines.

Alibre’s wide customer base ranges from single seat individual users of their consumer product, to small/medium sized businesses and government organizations for their professional products. At the consumer level, design is done with Alibre software and ‘right there and then’ output to the customer’s 3D Printer, but for business users the CAD files are often sent to rapid prototyping companies or machine shops for CNC based manufacturing.

With many 3D CAD solutions moving to the subscription style of licensing, Alibre serves their customers with node-locked perpetual style licenses that they rely on Zentitle to uphold. All this in a world of changing environments, such as with the rapid rise of VMs that are now even being adopted by many tech savvy consumers.

Having had a lot of issues with previous licensing and licensing vendors, including downtime and customer support tickets, Alibre had become disillusioned with the state of play as it was. Needing to put an end to support tickets from licensing issues, Alibre chose Nalpeiron.

Alibre tracks the trials of their software with Zentitle, so that they can see who is engaging with them, allowing them to focus their attention and bandwidth. When someone launches their software they can see this has happened within Salesforce.

With more leads coming in than their sales team can manage, this insight into which people are engaging with their Trial make it possible for sales to be effective, as well as creating great relationships with those people trying their software out.