Category : Software News

U.S. Justice Department has let review period pass without taking action against the deal.

T-Mobile USA is drawing closer to finishing its merger with MetroPCS Wireless as a deadline for action by the U.S. Department of Justice passed on Tuesday.

T-Mobile agreed last October to merge with the smaller MetroPCS, forming a larger No. 4 national carrier in the U.S. and one better able to build out an attractive LTE network. U.S. antitrust law dictates a waiting period for such deals to allow time for DOJ review. That waiting period ended on Tuesday without the DOJ acting to block the merger.

The proposed deal is still subject to other regulatory approvals, including from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. MetroPCS shareholders also need to pass the proposal. But the passing of the waiting period is good news for the two carriers.

The would-be partners aren’t expected to face much legal backlash against their plan, because it would create a stronger rival to the two big carriers that dominate the U.S. market, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. The idea of T-Mobile teaming up with a smaller player is a far cry from the merger with T-Mobile that the much larger AT&T proposed in March 2011. AT&T finally dropped that plan after strong opposition from the DOJ and the Federal Communications Commission. Critics said that deal would have hurt competition.

On Tuesday. MetroPCS said it expects the deal with T-Mobile to close shortly after a special meeting of MetroPCS shareholders on April 12. Once the deal is final, T-Mobile is expected to start converting 3G cell towers and phones for MetroPCS, which are based on CDMA, to T-Mobile’s GSM-based technology. That process is likely to take until the end of 2015. Though both companies are migrating toward newer LTE technology, a 3G network will still be needed for wide coverage and voice calls for some time.

Joining forces with MetroPCS will boost T-Mobile’s subscriber count from 33 million to 42 million, the companies said at the time of the merger deal. It would remain the fourth-largest U.S. carrier by subscribers, after AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel. The expanded T-Mobile will continue to focus on value for money, emphasizing low-cost, no-contract and unlimited data plans.

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Reports claim Microsoft’s slashed Windows prices for smaller touchscreen notebooks and tablets

Microsoft has done something it’s historically been loath to do: discount prices for the copies of Windows it sells to computer makers, online reports said today.

Both the Wall Street Journal and the Asian electronics supply chain publication DigiTimes published reports claiming that Microsoft has cut prices of Windows 8 and Office 2013 in an attempt to spark sales.

“They’ve always held [pricing] close to the vest,” said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research, in a Wednesday interview. “They’ve always been insistent on maintaining that pricing, but a discount makes sense, given the holiday season, the back-and-forth with the OEMs and the slow start to the Surface.”

Windows 8, which launched in October, has struggled to gain traction, and failed to trigger a boost in PC sales, as new editions have done in the past.

Earlier this week, for instance, research firm IDC said global PC sales would contract 1.3% this year, a drop atop 2012’s even-larger slump of 3.7%. IDC cited an “underwhelming reception” to Windows 8 as one of several factors that will lead to a second-consecutive year of declining PC sales.

A Windows price cut would also mollify long-time OEM partners, who have been increasingly at odds with Microsoft since the Redmond, Wash. developer announced its own hardware — the Surface line of tablets — last summer.

The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Microsoft was slashing the price of a combo deal for Windows 8 and Office 2013 to $30 from around $120. The discount applies to OEMs for PCs and other devices with touch screens smaller than 10.8 inches, said the publication.

DigiTimes had a different tale, saying the Windows 8 discount was just $20 off the usual $80 to $90 per PC, and that the cheaper price was applicable to PCs, tablets and hybrids — hardware that mixes elements of traditional laptops with tablets — equipped with screens 11.6-in. or smaller.

Discounts on Windows 8 could result in lower-priced touchscreen PC and tablets, perhaps as early as this summer when back-to-school sales kick off.

“If you think about the components in a PC, almost every one has dropped off a [price] cliff,” said Krans. “Except for the OS. Microsoft’s pricing is their one lever left, the last where it can have a big impact on PC prices.”

While touch-enabled hardware has been among the few bright spots for Windows 8, many buyers, used to shopping for cut-rate computers, have balked at their higher prices.

The targeted device sizes, whether 11.6-in. or 10.8-in., suggest that Microsoft is hoping to spark sales at the smaller end of the form factor spectrum, such as tablets bundled with keyboards — like the company’s own Surface Pro — or ultralight touch-enabled laptops similar to Apple’s 11.6-in. MacBook Air, a flash RAM-based notebook sans touch that starts at $999.

Taiwanese PC maker Asus yesterday acknowledged that Windows 8 has not helped overall PC sales, but that touch screen notebooks have been selling faster. Last year, Asus introduced the Taichi, an unusual laptop that features dual 11.6-in. touch-enabled displays. The Taichi retails for $1,299 and up.

Microsoft and its OEMs have been hit from several sides, including weak economies — especially in Europe — and dollars being diverted to tablets, most notably Apple’s iPads. Now, the Windows industry also faces ultra-cheap Chromebooks, laptops powered by Google’s browser-based Chrome OS, which have hit the price point of “netbooks,” the inexpensive Windows hardware that years ago pushed companies like Asus and Acer into the top OEM ranks.

The bestselling notebook on Amazon.com, for example, has long been Samsung’s 11.6-in. Chromebook, which goes for $249.

“It’s notable that Microsoft has been able to sustain its OEM prices this long,” said Krans. “But this is a reflection of the state of the computer market, which has been difficult for both OEMs and Microsoft. They have to get out in front of this shift.”

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The numbers look at national security investigations into some users.

Some thousand-plus Google users have been subject to FBI security information requests since 2009, the company said Tuesday. The data build on Google’s already existing tally of government data requests.

The new figures look at the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) — information requests from the FBI or other executive branch agencies for conducting national security investigations — that Google has received since 2009.

Google is presenting the data in the form of ranges, so it is not clear to what extent the number of NSLs issued to the company has been increasing or decreasing over the past several years.

Still, there were between 1,000 and 1,999 user accounts in question in 2009, 2011 and 2012, and NSL requests were made for between 2,000 and 2,999 accounts in 2010, Google said Tuesday in a blog post. For every year since 2009 there have been between zero and 999 NSLs covering those accounts, Google said.

The company is reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers given the government’s concern that releasing exact numbers would reveal information about the investigations, the company said.

Still, the numbers are being released to address people’s questions about “the increase in their use since 9/11,” Google did say.

“Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos,” said Richard Salgado, Google’s law enforcement and information security legal director, in the post.

But, “people don’t always use our services for good, and it’s important that law enforcement be able to investigate illegal activity,” he said.

With an NSL, Google may be compelled to disclose “the name, address, length of service, and local and long distance toll billing records” of a subscriber to a wire or electronic communications service, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

NSLs cannot be used to obtain other data from Google such as email content, search queries, YouTube videos or user IP addresses, Google said.

Google aims to scrutinize all government data requests carefully to ensure they satisfy the law and their policies, the company said.

Google’s biannual “transparency report” documents a range of government requests for users’ data, mostly as it pertains to criminal investigations.

The company’s last such report was published in January, which showed that from July through December 2012, Google had seen a modest rise in information requests for some 33,634 users.

The NSL figures, which Google plans to update annually, will be included in the company’s transparency reports going forward. The ranges are not included in the total sum of user data requests that Google has reported previously, the company said.

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The auction site has shared a new methodology for tracking energy efficiency.

There’s a maxim in the data center business that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.

The online auction giant has devised a methodology that looks at the cost of its IT operations in dollars, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions, and ties those costs back to a single performance metric — in eBay’s case, the number of buy and sell transactions its customers make at eBay.com.

The result is a set of data that provides the equivalent of a “miles per gallon” metric for data centers, which organizations can use as a baseline to improve on over time, said Dean Nelson, head of eBay’s Global Foundation Services, which manages its data centers worldwide.

“EBay is a single system, it’s the sum of a million parts, and we needed a way to measure and convey the efficiency of this system,” he said Tuesday at the Green Grid Forum, a data center efficiency conference in Santa Clara, California.

EBay has published the methodology in the hope that other companies will adopt it too, much as the industry rallied around Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, as a general metric for data center efficiency.

EBay’s system, which it calls the Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) dashboard, goes further than PUE, measuring its IT infrastructure and relating it to the four metrics its top executives care about most — revenue, performance, environmental impact and cost.

In the process of sharing its method, eBay took the unusual step of releasing a wealth of data about its own data centers. It operated 52,075 physical servers at the end of last year, and generated 740 metric tons of carbon per million users, or 1.6 tons per server.

It set itself a target of reducing its cost per transaction and carbon emissions per transaction by 10 percent this year, and of increasing its transactions per kilowatt hour by the same amount, Nelson said. It shared those figures too — apart from the costs in dollar terms, which it views as competitive data.

“We’re not going to show our detailed profit and loss numbers to everyone; we’re devising a metric to show how much we’re improving efficiency each year,” said Rohini Jain, finance lead for eBay’s technology infrastructure.

Still, it’s more data than most other companies provide. For instance, Google doesn’t disclose how many servers it operates or how much power its data centers consume, though it does publish efficiency data.

It may not be easy for other companies to replicate eBay’s methodology. EBay has a straightforward metric against which to measure performance — the number of transactions its customers make, which it measures in URLs — while many other firms have more complex business models.

It also helps that it is a technology-driven company willing to invest in energy-saving ideas. It brought its first solar farm online in December, generating 650 kilowatts of power, and it plans to install Bloom fuel cells later this year that will provide up to 6 megawatts of power.

The software, hardware, operations and finance teams at eBay are working together on the project, Nelson said. In one experiment, its software developers adjusted the memory utilization for a pool of servers, allowing it to eliminate 400 machines and save a megawatt of power, he said.

PUE was controversial when it was introduced by the Green Grid Forum six years ago, Nelson said, but it has since been adopted widely.

Like PUE, the “miles per gallon” data isn’t necessarily useful in and of itself, but it could give companies a benchmark to measure progress moving forward.

“We averaged 46,000 transactions per kilowatt hour last year. Was that good? We don’t know, we have nothing to baseline it against,” Nelson said.

This year, eBay — and everyone else — will be able to see how it’s doing.

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The company broke out of its regular patching cycle for the second time this year to fix an actively exploited flaw.

Oracle released emergency patches for Java on Monday to address two critical vulnerabilities, one of which is actively being exploited by hackers in targeted attacks.

The vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2013-1493 and CVE-2013-0809, are located in the 2D component of Java and received the highest possible impact score from Oracle.

“These vulnerabilities may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., they may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password,” the company said in a security alert. “For an exploit to be successful, an unsuspecting user running an affected release in a browser must visit a malicious web page that leverages these vulnerabilities. Successful exploits can impact the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of the user’s system.”

The newly released updates bump Java to versions 7 Update 17 (7u17) and 6 Update 43 (6u43), skipping over 7u16 and 6u42 for reasons that weren’t immediately clear.

Oracle notes that Java 6u43 will be the last publicly available update for Java 6 and advises users to upgrade to Java 7. The public availability of Java 6 updates was supposed to end with Java 6 Update 41, released on Feb. 19, but it seems the company made an exception for this emergency patch.

The CVE-2013-1493 vulnerability has been actively exploited by attackers since at least last Thursday, when researchers from security firm FireEye discovered attacks using it to install a piece of remote access malware called McRAT. However, it seems that Oracle was aware of this flaw’s existence since the beginning of February.

“Though reports of active exploitation of vulnerability CVE-2013-1493 were recently received, this bug was originally reported to Oracle on February 1st 2013, unfortunately too late to be included in the February 19th release of the Critical Patch Update for Java SE,” said Eric Maurice, Oracle’s director of software assurance, in a blog post Monday.

The company had planned to fix CVE-2013-1493 in the next scheduled Java Critical Patch Update on April 16, Maurice said. However, because the vulnerability started to be exploited by attackers, Oracle decided to release a patch sooner.

The two vulnerabilities addressed with the latest updates don’t affect Java running on servers, stand-alone Java desktop applications or embedded Java applications, Maurice said. Users are advised to install the patches as soon as possible, he said.

Users can disable support for Web-based Java content from the security tab in the Java control panel if they don’t need Java on the Web. The security settings for such content are set to high by default, meaning users are prompted to authorize the execution of Java applets that are unsigned or self-signed inside browsers.

This is designed to prevent the automated exploitation of Java vulnerabilities over the Web, but only works if users are capable of making informed decisions about which applets to authorize and which not to. “In order to protect themselves, desktop users should only allow the execution of applets when they expect such applets and trust their origin,” Maurice said.

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The Obama administration sides with 114,000 petition signers after unlocking was made illegal under the DMCA.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has sided with more than 100,000 petition signers who asked the government to legalize the unlocking of smartphones.

The White House on Monday agreed with petitioners who asked the Library of Congress to rescind a decision that removed the act of unlocking a smartphone from the legal exceptions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Buyers of smartphones and tablets should be able to unlock their devices “without risking criminal or other penalties,” R. David Edelman, White House senior adviser for Internet, innovation and privacy, wrote in response to the petition on Whitehouse.gov.

Phone unlocking entrepreneur Sina Khanifar started the petition in late January and more than 114,000 people signed it. The Obama administration has promised to respond to petitions that collect more than 100,000 signatures within a month.

Unlocking a phone is typically used to switch carriers. “If you have paid for your mobile device, and aren’t bound by a service agreement or other obligation, you should be able to use it on another network,” Edelman wrote. “It’s common sense, crucial for protecting consumer choice, and important for ensuring we continue to have the vibrant, competitive wireless market that delivers innovative products and solid service to meet consumers’ needs.”

A legal protection for unlocking mobile phones expired in late January after the Librarian of Congress decided to leave it out of a list of exemptions under the DMCA.

The Obama administration would support a “range of approaches” to addressing mobile phone unlocking, including legislation and action by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Edelman wrote.

“We would encourage mobile providers to consider what steps they as businesses can take to ensure that their customers can fully reap the benefits and features they expect when purchasing their devices,” he added.

The Library of Congress, in a statement, defended the rulemaking process used to review exemptions under the DMCA. The library did not indicate that it would change its decision.

“The rulemaking is a technical, legal proceeding and involves a lengthy public process,” the library said.A The proceeding is “based on a factual record developed by the proponents and other interested parties.A The officials must consider whether the evidence establishes a need for the exemption based on several statutory factors.”

The library’s statement suggested a role for Congress or the administration in changing the unlocking rules.

The rulemaking process “was not intended to be a substitute for deliberations of broader public policy,” the statement said. “[The] rulemaking can often serve as a barometer for broader policy concerns and broader policy action.A The most recent rulemaking has served this purpose.”

Khanifar, the petition starter, said he was happy to see the White House response. “As the White House said in the response, keeping unlocking legal is really ‘common sense,’ and I’m excited to see them recognizing this. David was enthusiastic about getting this fixed as quickly as possible,” he wrote in an email. “This is a big victory for consumers, and I’m glad to have played a part in it.”

Many people reacting to the petition expressed doubt that it would have an impact, he said. “The optimist in me is really glad to have proved them wrong,” he said. “The White House just showed that they really do listen, and that they’re willing to take action.”

Derek Khanna, a copyright activist and author of a controversial House Republican Study Committee memo on copyright reform last November, also praised the White House decision.

“It shows the power of the people to affirmatively act to fix policy rather than just stop bad policy,” he wrote in an email. “We the people have this power when we come together to fight for positive, common-sense solutions.”

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Apple and Samsung will have to start a new trial to determine some of the damages in the case.

A judge has ordered a partial retrial in Apple’s patent lawsuit against Samsung in California, and has cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the US$1 billion in damages Apple was awarded last summer.

Judge Lucy Koh, in an order published Friday, said the jury had applied an “impermissible legal theory” when calculating the damages Apple should receive for Samsung’s infringement of its patents.

Koh struck about $450 million off of Apple’s award and ordered a retrial to determine the correct damages related to about a dozen of the Samsung smartphones and tablets at issue in the trial.

She let stand Apple’s damages of $598.9 million for another 14 of the products.

The order doesn’t mean Apple won’t receive more than the $598 million, but it will have to go back to court to see how much money it can get.

The jury originally awarded Apple $1.05 billion, but Samsung asked for a retrial, arguing that the award was improperly calculated.

One of the issues concerns the date on which Apple notified Samsung that it was infringing some of its patents. Apple set that date too early in some cases, Koh said, which means the resulting damage calculations were too high.

Apple could have avoided the problems, Koh suggested.

“[I]t was Apple’s strategic decision to submit an expert report using an aggressive notice date for all of the patents. The need for a new trial could have been avoided had Apple chosen a more circumspect strategy or provided more evidence to allow the jury or the Court to determine the appropriate award for a shorter notice period,” she wrote.

Still, it was a complex case involving multiple patents and more than two dozen Samsung products, and many observers suspected at the time that the jury had miscalculated the damages.

Different types of patents call for different methods of calculating damages, and not all the products at trial were accused of infringing the same patents. For example, calculations for “design” patents can take into account how much profit Samsung made from selling the infringing devices, but “utility” patents can only take into account Apple’s lost profits and the royalty payments it would have received.

In some cases, Koh said, the jurors included lost profits in their calculations when they should not have.

The jury also had to consider the date on which Apple notified Samsung of the infringement. Apple told Samsung about one of the patents on Aug. 4, 2010, but Koh said it gave no evidence at trial that Samsung knew about other patents until Apple filed its lawsuit eight months later, and for still other patents until two months after that.

Koh said she didn’t have enough information to recalculate the damages herself, so she ordered the retrial for the products where errors were made. They include the Galaxy Tab, Prevail, Nexus S 4G, Galaxy II AT&T, Droid Charge and Epic 4G, among others.

Apple had also asked the court to award it additional damages for sales that took place since the trial ended. Koh said Apple was entitled to more money but that she wouldn’t make the calculation until appeals in the case have played out.

The case was heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. Early last year, Apple filed a second lawsuit in the same court that involves some newer Samsung products. Koh has said she’d prefer that case be put on hold until the first one gets resolved.

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The company believes the attack was a coordinated attempt to compromise its systems

Evernote, which makes business and consumer productivity software for things like taking notes and doing research, is forcing all of its 50 million users to change their passwords after detecting a hacker intrusion on its sytem.

The attacker gained access to Evernote accounts’ usernames, email addresses and passwords. Although passwords are encrypted, the company “in an abundance of caution” is implementing a password reset, the company said in a blog post on Saturday.

There is no evidence that the malicious hackers accessed user content nor that they got a hold of customers’ payment information, according to the company.

The network “suspicious activity” that Evernote detected and blocked was an apparent “coordinated attempt” to break into secure areas of its service, Evernote said in the post.

“After signing in, you will be prompted to enter your new password. Once you have reset your password on evernote.com, you will need to enter this new password in other Evernote apps that you use. We are also releasing updates to several of our apps to make the password change process easier, so please check for updates over the next several hours,” reads Evernote’s blog post.

Evernote is the latest victim in a recent string of hacking incidents against high-profile technology companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook.

Evernote makes free and fee-based applications that can be accessed via web browsers, mobile devices and desktop computers.

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Patent lawsuits by non-practicing entities hurt innovation, tech groups say

So-called patent trolls force technology companies to spend money on lawyers instead of innovation, and Congress needs to discourage infringement lawsuits from patent-collecting companies, a group of tech and business representatives said.

The number of infringement lawsuits filed by non-practicing entities (NPEs) — patent owners that don’t sell products — is exploding, and tech entrepreneurs often pay settlements to these companies instead of racking up millions of dollars in legal costs, said Ed Goodmann, policy and research manager at Engine Advocacy, a trade group representing tech startups.

Demand letters threatening legal action from patent trolls — also called NPEs or patent assertion entities — distract a tech company from its core business, added Seth Brown, head of litigation at Living Social, a daily-deal website based in Washington.

When facing patent lawsuits, Living Social must pull its most experienced developers from their duties and “force them to sit in a room with a bunch of boring lawyers,” Brown said during a Capitol Hill discussion about patent trolls on Thursday.

U.S. product-making companies mounted more than 5,800 defenses against patent troll lawsuits in 2011, four times the number they defended against in 2005, according to the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the tech trade group sponsoring the patent discussion.

An in-court defense against a patent troll lawsuit costs a small or medium-sized business nearly $1.8 million, while an average settlement costs $1.3 million, CCIA said.

While five of the six panelists at the CCIA event represented the tech industry, NPEs are becoming a problem for other businesses as well, said Erik Lieberman, regulatory counsel at the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group representing grocery stores. In recent months, many grocery stores have been receiving licensing demand letters for common technologies they use, including Web search menus and Wi-Fi routers, he said.

Lawsuits by NPEs are “legal extortion,” Lieberman said.

The CCIA panel didn’t include any representatives of NPEs.

Even though Congress passed the America Invents Act, a patent reform law that makes it easier to challenge issued patents, more action is needed because of the growing problem of lawsuits by NPEs, the panelists said.

Brown and Julie Samuels, a patent attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both praised the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act, introduced by two lawmakers on Wednesday. The bill would allow judges to force NPE plaintiffs in patent infringement lawsuits to pay the court costs of the defendant, if the plaintiff loses the case.

The SHIELD Act would make the “troll business model a lot less attractive,” Samuels said.

While the SHIELD Act could help with lawsuits, it wouldn’t protect many small businesses and startups, said Alan Schoenbaum, senior vice president and general counsel at Web hosting company Rackspace. Many small businesses “can’t even afford to go to court,” he said.

Schoenbaum called on Congress to find other ways to protect small businesses from NPE lawsuits.

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SAP still requires 131 pages of fine print to describe software licensing rules for its products

SAP customers have made it no secret they believe the vendor’s software licensing and pricing is far too complex, and a top company leader recently made a public pledge that things are changing for the better. But a recently created internal SAP document obtained by IDG News Service suggests that the company has its work cut out for it.

The document, marked “confidential,” runs to 131 pages and indicates it was updated in January. Contained within is a detailed rundown of SAP’s licensing policies, which on balance suggest that customers indeed face a wall of complexity when dealing with the vendor.

For example, the document lists roughly 15 named user types for SAP’s flagship Business Suite alone. They include Developer, Business Expert, Professional, Limited Professional, Business Information, Employee, Employee Self-Service, Employee Self-Service Core, Business Expert Upgrade, B2B Sales, Professional Upgrade, Limited Professional Upgrade, Business Information Upgrade, and Employee Upgrade, according to the document.

SAP’s wording of the descriptions is also too complicated and confusing for customers, said analyst Frank Scavo, president of the IT consulting firm Strativa.

Scavo cited the description for SAP’s CRM Rapid Deployment Edition User licenses. These users are “solely authorized to (i) access the SAP CRM Rapid Deployment Edition and (ii) perform SAP ERP order-status checks through SAP CRM,” the document states. “Access to other SAP software requires a SAP Application Business Expert User, a SAP Application Professional User or a SAP Application Limited Professional User license. The rights granted to a SAP CRM Rapid Deployment Edition User are included in the existing SAP Application Business Expert User, SAP Application Professional User and SAP Application Limited Professional User. The SAP CRM Rapid Deployment Edition User also includes the rights granted under the SAP Application Employee User.”

“These rights are not easy to understand,” Scavo added. “I challenge any SAP prospect to read these definitions and explain what they mean.”

Overall, the document suggests that “it might be that SAP lawyers are being paid by the word,” Scavo added.

SAP users have made their discontent with the vendor’s licensing policies well known. Survey results released in October by the UK and Ireland SAP User Group found that 95 percent of respondents believed SAP’s policies are too complex.

SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe responded to those concerns in an interview later that month with IDG News Service.

“We now have multiple products in five categories,” Snabe said, referring to SAP’s range of cloud software, mobile technology, HANA in-memory database and other offerings. “That puts you in a more complex situation. What we’re trying to do is come to a solutions approach.”

SAP wants to roll up various products into bundles “that have high value for the customer,” and simplified pricing. SAP’s series of Rapid Deployment Solutions, which have been rolled out in recent years, represent this approach, Snabe added.

Snabe also cautioned, however, that users shouldn’t expect a major announcement regarding license simplification “in the immediate future.”

Overall, the sheer scope of SAP’s licensing policies suggests Snabe was wise to set no great expectations, given how long it could take to fully unravel and simplify them, as well as retrain SAP’s sales team and channel partners on a new model.

SAP has made further strides in the area of licensing simplification, and also seeks to effectively educate its customers on the topic, according to SAP spokesman James Dever.

The 131-page document is not meant for public consumption, aimed instead at “sales people who need to be knowledgeable chapter-and-verse in order to talk to customers,” Dever said Thursday. SAP has provided another, public document meant for customers which is easier to grasp and runs about 25 pages including appendices, Dever noted.

Dever declined to comment on the contents of the longer document.

There’s a rationale for the level of detail in SAP’s licensing, Dever added. “The various types of use cases is a decision by SAP to define the value and the types of use with some precision,” he said. “We’re not taking a one-size-fits-all approach. That said, we’re doing things that we can to make things simpler. We acknowledge it’s an ongoing effort.”

SAP is also getting deeper into the SaaS (software as a service) business, which tends to be sold in simpler terms via monthly subscription. “As our cloud business grows, we gain experience from that and find opportunities to simplify,” Dever said.

Some significant progress has already been made in recent times, such as SAP’s successfully creating a standardized set of contract templates for use worldwide, Dever added. “That’s a pretty major victory for us.”

There’s also a fresh example of the bundling approach Snabe referred to, in the form of SAP’s recently announced 360 Customer product, Dever said.

Some observers aren’t seeing major change for the better just yet. “From our perspective, with some of the deals we’ve been working on, [licensing] hasn’t been simplified at all,” said David Blake , CEO of UpperEdge, an IT sourcing and consulting firm that deals frequently with SAP contract negotiations on behalf of customers.

But SAP is not the only offender in this regard among enterprise software vendors, according to Jeff Lazarto, principal at UpperEdge.

While UpperEdge’s clients generally believe SAP rival Oracle’s licensing policies are simpler and more transparent than SAP’s, Lazarto cautioned against making a straight apples-to-apples comparison between the companies.

That because while Oracle has long provided public price lists for its products, in actual negotiations “what we typically see is that everything Oracle proposes is a custom bundle,” Lazarto said. As a result, it can be difficult for customers to keep track of which product in the bundle is getting what level of discount off the list price. Oracle has also come under fire for a perception of licensing complexity, particularly with respect to its widely used database.

Meanwhile, although “SAP guards the price book like the Holy Grail, they price off of it,” Lazarto said. “Oracle discloses the price list but doesn’t necessarily price off of it.”

SAP also “does better job of managing the sales cycle and the sales relationship” with customers than Oracle, Lazarto said. This culture has a “lot to do with executive leadership” at SAP, namely co-CEOs Snabe and Bill McDermott, he said.

However, Snabe’s discussion of SAP moving to a bundled license approach over time could mean customers face the same challenges as Oracle shops in determining whether they’re getting the best deal.

Bundles will also require customers to be more flexible and a “little more vanilla” in their tastes, said IDC analyst Amy Konary. “A lot of times what happens on the customer side is they’ll be presented with a bundle but it doesn’t meet their needs.” That makes the customer the one potentially introducing more complexity if they decide to make changes in the deal, Konary said.

It will likely take a long time for SAP to phase in major changes to its licensing model, but doing so is important for both customers as well as the company, Konary added.

For one thing, complex license arrangements could expose customers to a higher risk of failing a license audit by SAP, she said. While a customer may have a few employees working on deals who do understand the details, “there are a lot of other people that come into contact with [software] that have the opportunity to misuse it inadvertently,” he said.

Even for internal people or partners, licensing “should not be overly complex” as it introduces friction and uncertainty in the sales process, Konary added. “What ends up happening is a customer goes to a sales rep or a partner and asks for a quote, and they’ll get a different answer from every person.”

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