If you are in the business of making software tools and services, you have license agreements with every one of your customers.
You likely try to make your agreements consistent across many terms, but for most software companies some terms and conditions are inevitably subject to negotiation and change over time, and can vary widely from customer to customer. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of customers, and it’s almost impossible to keep track of the variations that can expose you to risks, uncertainties, and unexpected costs. It’s the variations that can cause problems.
When it comes to software licensing, the devil is in the details, and you need a fast, accurate, and reliable way to have the details at your fingertips at all times.
Software Licensing: Docugami Helps You Find the Devil in the Details
At the most basic level, you want an automated way to know exactly when each of your license agreements is set to expire, so you can be proactive about addressing any customer satisfaction issues, driving timely renewals, and reducing negative churn. At a slightly deeper level, you want an automated way to know any non-standard terms and conditions in each of your contracts, which may have been required by the customer in your initial negotiations, so that you can perhaps reduce or eliminate that variation as part of your standard renewal process.
Tracking the detailed provisions and subtle differences in your software licenses across hundreds or thousands of customers is a tedious, expensive, and error-prone process.
But today, thanks to advances in AI, declarative markup, and the cloud, you can automate the entire process, saving time and money, and freeing your staff up for higher value work.
Docugami automatically identifies and captures the content of every section, every clause, every date, every price, every condition, every obligation, and creates a hierarchical data representation of each document in its entirety.
Docugami turns every element of your license agreements into actionable data, making it easy and efficient to track performance, anticipate renewal dates, identify non-standard provisions, assemble new documents, generate insights and reports, and drive input into line-of-business systems.
Best of all, Docugami is designed for frontline workers and managers. It does not require massive investments in machine learning, staff training, IT development, or armies of consultants. Docugami can understand your unique software licenses, and provide value on Day One.
Download The Slide Deck
Learn how Docugami's AI helps software licensors manage their agreements.
Variety may be the spice of life, but it's the bane of risk managers
Understanding your unique software license agreements, and identifying variations across your entire portfolio of licenses is an area where Docugami really shines.
As a software licensor, odds are that many, if not most, of your license agreements will be executed using your standard contract terms and conditions as the starting point (so-called “first party paper”). There are exceptions of course, such as when you license your technology to a much larger or more established firm, who may demand that their standard licensing terms and conditions be used.
Even if your standard terms and conditions are the starting point, key provisions often get negotiated and redlined, resulting in a large number of executed contracts with subtle or not-so-subtle differences that can be extremely hard to track and manage over time. Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) can hold unique commitments that impact ongoing engineering, operations, and support capabilities. New regulations can require changes to terms across many of your agreements.
Negotiations often focus on the Liability and Liability Cap clauses. If you have varying Liability provisions across your license portfolio, it’s critical to know which contracts have your standard language and which contracts include variations or concessions.
Another set of terms and conditions that are increasingly important – and increasingly subject to negotiation in licensing – are the obligations and liabilities of the parties in the event of a data breach or other privacy incident.
Data breaches are not a new phenomenon, but the risk landscape has changed significantly in recent years, making privacy and security some of the most closely scrutinized and heavily negotiated elements of any software license. Indeed, any company that has been licensing software for more than a few years has likely seen a significant evolution of their own contract terms related to privacy and security. Understanding the specific security and privacy provisions in every one of your contracts is critical to understanding your risk and responsibilities. And it’s something you want to understand in advance; you certainly don’t want to be trying to figure out which of your 29 flavors of liability terms and conditions is lurking in a license agreement with a specific customer, in the middle of a potential privacy situation.
Unlocking ALL the information provides needed flexibility
Relying on a prescribed list of risk terms in contract review, as supported by early attempts at AI-based review, is unlikely to catch everything. Your analysis of contracts must be adaptable and regularly updated. So most companies simply take the time and conduct tedious line-by-line, document-by-document review by staff. This is no longer necessary.
Docugami’s powerful combination of multiple stages of AI processing, declarative markup, and other technologies enables your team to automatically identify any anomalies across your entire license portfolio. Any terms are available for you to assess. This gives you the information you need to adapt to your customers and manage any risk in the most proactive and cost-effective manner.
