A renewable limited time licenses for use in SaaS bussines model that support limited time licenses.
The licenses could be obtained via Paypal for registred integrators. I think it could be very interesting.
Could you provide an example application where your user would want to purchase software for a limited time period? What is the advantage? Do you expect it to land jobs where your customer will want the software for longer? Or do you have applications where the job is “complete” and you don’t need the system after some fixed amount of time? Or do your customers prefer paying as a subscription.
I’m guessing that some enterprising integrator would be able to build a business model out of hosted SCADA systems similar to Amazon EC2. SaaS type licensing would fit that model nicely.
This is all my personal opinion, btw.
Kind of makes sense, I guess. I can’t really get past the idea of the customer paying a bit less, then trying to mark up a recurring software fee. That only makes sense to me if it buys you more integration work or gets you in the door on a project where you otherwise couldn’t. If I were that enterprising integrator, I would charge the customer enough to pay back the software quickly - say $1k/month for a Works package based service to pay back my investment in under a year. I would try to require that the customer commit to some time. After that point the profit goes entirely to me. If a customer cancels, I would suspend the EC2 instance and re-use my license key for my next customer’s project. If I had some big, ambitious hosted plans I’d contact my support rep.
I haven’t heard much recent discussion (and it’s not on the roadmap), but the guys have tossed around the idea of a “hosted” version. The idea is that one Ignition instance could support whole sets of: projects, users, db/plc connections, etc. I imagine it working like a modern web server where it uses 1 public IP address and DNS HTTP host headers to determine which one. So to the user it looks like they’re going to mypublicscada.com or publicscada.myexistingcompany.com, but to the host it’s all resolving to the same Ignition gateway and IP address. You would probably want to white label it and have elevated admin privileges. It’s a cool idea, but not on anybody’s radar. Don’t expect it anytime soon.