BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of the Invention

The present invention relates generally to software licensing and subscriptions, and in particular, to a system, method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for managing user auditable secure tokens in a consumption based software subscription licensing system

2. Description of the Related Art

Various licensing/subscription schemes/protocols may be utilized to authorize, activate, and use software on client and server computers. There are three common software licensing models—subscription, perpetual, and consumption based. A subscription is billed at periodic time intervals (e.g., each month/annum) regardless of use and is also referred to as “software as a service” (SaaS). A perpetual system enables a user to purchase the software and the purchaser may use it forever. In a consumption or pay-per-use software licenses, customers pay relative to their usage of the software. Embodiments of the invention address problems associated with a consumption/pay-per-use model. To better understand the problems of the prior art, a more detailed description of the desired functionality and use of a consumption based model may be useful.

With respect to functionality, it is desirable to provide flexibility and options (to customers) to enable the use of software on an on-demand basis. In addition, customers (e.g., small individual companies/firms) may prefer a no commitment on-demand basis payment plan. Further, such customers may desire to minimize the management of a required software product. In some scenarios, a customer may require a subset of software products (e.g., from a larger distributed set of products) on a short term basis (e.g., in order to champion a customer's idea, product, and innovation). However, it may not be known in advance, which product the user should subscribe to. Accordingly, payment flexibility and product usage flexibility are highly desirable. Further, token-based flexible models with large enterprises have resulted in positive feedback catalyzing a desire to provide a similar token-based model for individual, small, and medium size enterprises (i.e., traditional prior art systems fail to satisfy the needs of both large enterprises as well as needs for individual, small, and medium size enterprises). Accordingly, prior art systems that attempt to provide a consumption based systems (e.g., FLEXERA) fail to provide the flexibility needed to address emerging technologies, cloud based systems, and business needs of consumers.

In addition to the lack of flexibility, the consumption model comes with its own set of challenges. When enabling subscription workflows in a manner that is well suited for every customer, the major challenge is in trusting the consumption report. For example, with public utilities such as electricity meters at home or a gas pipe connection, customers should have full trust in the method of recording the usages to maintain a healthy billing. One key aspect of the public utilities is that the instrument is installed locally at a customer's house and the customer can always validate the billing with the usages at the customer's door step.

In a similar scenario to public utilities, one may examine the payment for a mobile device's consumption. The call records are all saved in the customer's mobile device and the records can be audited by the customer to confirm/verify the charges.

In view of the above, what is needed is a consumption based workflow for the licensing and subscription domain that enables auditability (e.g., by the user), flexibility to meet the rising business needs, and a security layer to ensure compliance with the licensing model for the software provider as well as the consumer.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Embodiments of the invention provide a mechanism to enable a software consumption based model that overcomes the problems of the prior art. Embodiments provide auditability support at the customer's doorstep/desktop with configurable policy support (the customer will be able to decrypt consumption information data at the customer's machine itself). The dependency on third party security is removed by providing flexibility in terms of a workflow implementation and full control/ownership of the workflows. Thus, embodiments of the invention define a workflow using client capabilities and provide auditability at a local customer computer with all of the secure historical data about consumption at the client (instead of taking data outside of the client and consolidating at a server).

