Business Objects Licensing Tool Doesn’t Deliver

As if Symantec, Adobe, Microsoft and others haven’t already adequately proven the point, yet another software company is demonstrating that corporate-wide licensing enforcement systems usually just cause trouble for customers and vendors alike. That’s certainly what one reader has observed with his company’s recent experiences with Business Objects’ Enterprise Software Delivery (ESD) licensing system.

“I just wanted to submit a gripe that, with some negative publicity, may bring about a positive change,” the reader wrote. “For the past few months, Business Objects — owners of the Business Objects and Crystal Reports applications, and soon to be acquired by SAP — has had massive problems with their ESD service. This service allows registered owners to download approved applications & most service packs. This ‘license management’ scheme is provided by a company called Intraware. Ignoring Business Objects ineptitude in ensuring their customers licenses are properly made available on the ESD site, logging in and downloading applications is an exercise in futility.”

The reader, who works at a large financial institution, says that for months he and his colleagues have found it nearly impossible to download anything via ESD. “After logging in, attempting to see what ‘product updates and service packs’ are available yields no lists, just ‘server unavailable’ timeouts. Same holds true with seeing a list of programs that can be downloaded. Even if you can actually get a product list and are actually able to download — usually at 3 AM on a Sunday morning — you’re often downloading gigabytes at a time at dial-up speeds (like 5KB/sec) while praying that the connection does not drop. Of course, if it does drop, you have to start the download all over again. This is in contrast to some non-ESD downloads that are available directly from Business Objects, which usually happen quickly (500KB-1MB/sec) and without issues.”

ESD hadn’t caused problems for the reader’s company until the last few months of 2007, but the recent problems have had significant negative consequences. “Our group has had to delay testing and a roll-out of a product we’ve paid for and licensed to use simply because we couldn’t download what we needed to!” the reader wrote. “Business Objects obviously knows about the problem, as their support and sales people are being strong-armed by their customers into burning the service packs onto CDs and overnighting them to customers. While I don’t know specifically what the Service Level Agreement in our contract with Business Objects is for getting us updates, I do know it’s not weeks!”

The reader suspects this is just penny-wise, pound-foolishness on Business Objects’ part. “I’m guessing either Intraware doesn’t have the bandwidth to support this many customers, or Business Objects is too cheap to pay them to support us. Of course, overnighting CDs is probably more expensive for the company, which is what I don’t understand. Business Objects could cut down the number of support calls to their useless first-line call center in India if they would fix ESD, as I have been told by their support people who have been getting swamped by support tickets for this for months. But nobody on the management side seems to be taking much of an interest in getting it resolved, so maybe a little bad press might be noticed by someone there … or someone at SAP.”

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