The Adobe License Manager and Acrobat

Up until now, corporate customers have generally been spared having to deal with product activation and other anti-piracy technology in the software products they buy in volume. With Acrobat 8, however, Adobe is rather quietly and somewhat tentatively introducing an embedded license control technology called the Adobe License Manager.

For reasons I’m not entirely clear on myself, I seem to be the first trade press person in a position to report on the Adobe License Manager (ALM). It’s not that Adobe’s been keeping it a secret that it planned to introduce an asset management tool that would track Adobe volume licenses for anti-piracy purposes. For months Adobe has been openly discussing it with some customers and analysts in various venues. There is now a FAQ page on ALM on Adobe’s website, and the company is beginning a customer education campaign about it this week. Which makes it all the stranger that Adobe’s press materials last week announcing Acrobat 8 were silent on the subject of ALM, considering that it seems like something corporate customers interested in the new Acrobat will want to know.

Perhaps that’s where the tentativeness I referred to comes in. Prior to the Acrobat announcement, Adobe made the decision that for the first year of version 8 volume license customers will be able to “opt out” from using ALM. At deployment time – after the volume agreement has been negotiated and approved, in other words – the customer will have the option until Fall of 2007 to deploy Acrobat 8 software that does not have ALM embedded. In addition, Adobe has always planned an “exception” system to provide non-ALM versions to customers who can demonstrate they have an established software asset management system in place that can adequately track Adobe licenses. The details of how customers will qualify for such exceptions have not yet been worked out.

So why is Adobe doing this? “There are a number of forces that our customers tell us are marking license management more of an issue for them,” said Drew McManus, director of corporate product management for Adobe. “Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory requirements are making people more aware of compliance, and customers are telling us they are getting audited more often by vendor or trade associations. Managing software licenses in a corporate environment is becoming more complex – using different tools to track them will often give you different answers.”

The way Adobe has described it to me, ALM sounds like something of a cross between product activation DRM technology and a software asset management tool. When a user installs Acrobat, the ALM software will request an “e-license” from a server that can be either on the corporate network or an Adobe-hosted server accessed via the Internet. As long as the customer has enough e-licenses remaining, the installation will proceed with the end user having little interaction with ALM. If licenses are running short, the customer’s ALM administrator is alerted. Customers will even have a certain grace period during which they may be in “overdraft” with more Acrobat copies installed than licenses before attempts to install new copies will fail.

Even when the customer has exceeded their licenses, Adobe says the compliance information will stay with the customer and will not be relayed to Adobe. “In designing ALM over the last three years, we had a number of guiding principles,” said McManus. “Customers must be able to buy and deploy our products just as they always have, it has to be non-intrusive for end users, and it has to be completely anonymous so we’re not learning anything about the customer’s compliance. So it alerts the customer if you’re maxing out, but it doesn’t alert Adobe.”

ALM will not have the usage reporting capabilities of a full-fledged software asset management system, so while it will tell you when you don’t have enough licenses, it won’t necessarily make it clear when you have more licenses than you really need. And in a large corporation over time the count might get artificially high because, like all anti-piracy technology, ALM won’t deal well with hardware failures. Uninstalling Acrobat will bring up a procedure that returns the e-license to the corporate pool, but getting credit for the license that was on a dead PC may require a phone call to Adobe customer service.

Over the last few months, McManus says that Adobe has been running field tests of ALM with some of its customers. Predictably enough, he says the response has been overwhelmingly positive, but clearly some of the feedback they received helped lead to the decision to make ALM use voluntary over the next year. “One thing we saw was that deploying the system just to manage Acrobat was going to be a problem in some environments where they would prefer to be able to use it across the entire Adobe product line,” McManus says. “We will be introducing ALM on other products and platforms, but we’re just not there yet. Also, with many of our larger customers, deploying any new technology requires an evaluation period on their part, and we didn’t want to cloud the Acrobat 8 purchase decision with that process.”

In fact, cynics might suggest that the prospect of the ALM becoming mandatory next year could spur corporate customers to adopt Acrobat 8 more quickly than they might otherwise, just so they can get the software without ALM embedded. But, even for those who aren’t so cynical, the Adobe License Manager is going to raise a number of questions. For example, do corporate customers really want to have to deal with vendor-specific license control systems? In tomorrow’s story we’ll discuss that issue and more.

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