Zentitle Dynamic Entitlements

One of the innovations that Nalpeiron brought to the market is a concept we call Dynamic Entitlements. So how do Dynamic Entitlements work? Well, it used to be you have a static license that got embedded in some text file may be digitally signed, but that was it. You would generate that license the customer would install it and then that was it. With Dynamic Entitlements, it changes that whole paradigm.

So with that entitlement in the cloud, you can make as many modifications to that entitlement as you wish, extend subscription periods, add on features, change counts, what have you, and know that when the application activates against that individual license. It will grab a copy of all the metadata around that license. And bring it into a securely managed cache. Now this is of course for an on prem use case. For a SaaS use case, you simply squirrel away the JSON payload that the rest based API provides.

So what that does is give the application full ability to work with the cached set of attributes of that license.

Now also tied to that dynamic entitlement is what we call the lease period. So if you're familiar with like a DHCP lease period on a router kind of acts in a somewhat similar manner in that this defines the length of time that your application can reference the cached data before forcing a refresh of that data from that Zentitle Cloud.

And so that way, the lease period acts completely independently of the term of the license itself. You could have a perpetual license, you could have a one year subscription, but perhaps have a lease period that forces a refresh once a day, once a week, once a month.

So what that gives you the ability to do is also change that lease period over time depending on the working relationship with that specific customer. So for example, let's go through, an example. So let's say you sell a one year subscription license to a brand new customer. So you have no payment history with them. You, you know, have no real working relationship. You're just doing that initial one year subscription.

So for that use case, you may want to say, okay. Well, we're getting paid net thirty, net six days or what have you. So we're gonna initially implement a lease period, forcing a refresh once a week. So the customer will immediately be able to access the license, activate seats, etc.

It will that the lease period is force an update once a week. And so you know that there will never be more of a lag than one week. Between that cached view of the license and what's contained in the Zentitle Cloud. So let's look at a couple of contingency.

What if they don't pay? You know, what if they're really slow? You know, ninety days have gone by and you still haven't received payment? Well, you can disable that entitlement.

In the cloud or restrict it down to a free version or whatever policy you choose to implement, and know that whatever changes you've made here must, by nature, propagate down into that cached environment within whatever time frame you've set against that lease period. So that gives you full ongoing remote control against that entitlement, which is why we call them Dynamic Entitlements. Another way people have thought about this is this is really a virtual twin of that device in the field. So you always have that representation of exactly what the capabilities are in that device minus the lag that could be generated by the lease period.

So this gives you the best of all worlds, the ability to define a lease period that can change over time based on the relationship with the customer, giving you full control but easy dynamic deployment.

So let's look at a couple of other ways that the dynamic entitlement mechanism can be leveraged.

So for one, we have a call within the SDK that is a non blocking connection back to this end title cloud to see if that end customer has a live connection. So if they do have a live connection, what you could choose to do, and this is obviously a policy under your control is even though a lease period perhaps has not yet expired to do a courtesy refresh to get the latest greatest set of rights from the cloud, bring that back onto to the cache, reset the lease period, and away you go. So what this does is give you a very resilient kind of mechanism where any changes that are made in the cloud will come down on as frequent a basis as the end customer's connection allows.

So you have the latest greatest rights in that cash as long as there's connectivity.

But if there isn't a connection, then you've always, extended that lease period to the maximum window that you are comfortable with.

Meaning that they can then be intermittently offline for some extended period of time. So, basically, takes advantage of a connection when you have one, but still enforces that maximum lease period if they're separated from the network.

The other thing that Dynamic Entitlements gives you the ability to do is When a customer is upgrading a license or extending a subscription or whatever changes that they may want make upgrades, cross grades, renewals, and so forth. As soon as you make those changes in the Zentitle Cloud, then the customer can say force a refresh of those license rights directly from the cloud, perhaps through a gesture within your application, you know, license refresh, what have you, That will bring down those upgraded set of rights within the application, which will then allow that customer to gain the benefit of the upgraded rights, etc, whether an extension of the subscription, new features, what have you. So all of that can take effect immediately. So again, that's one of the benefits of dynamic entitlement says, as you make changes, perhaps on the phone from a salesperson standpoint, it can propagate directly down into that in customer environment, and they can start using it immediately.