In 2002 Computer Associates International was sometimes criticised for not communicating well with its user community. The New Year however has seen the giant software vendor going all out to tell the world about both its flexible licensing offerings and being less concerned with explaining its financial position with its third quarter returns.

The Islandia, New York based company has kicked off 2003 with a global advertising campaign focusing on its new software licensing offering, FlexSelect, a model designed to be customer centric. With adverts due to appear on television networks around the world and in the press, CA is certainly making a high visibility bid, asking customers to recognise its brand and focus attention on how organisations pay for their software.

CA describes FlexSelect as providing its customers with a method of licensing software that accurately reflects the way their business operates and that allows users to more accurately map software costs to the business processes that it is installed to support. Indeed, the licensing scheme does supply levels of flexibility not usually available to customers. For example, FlexSelect supports much shorter contracts than those traditionally supplied by software vendors. This approach allows users, for example, to license the software required during migration projects with a subsequent reduction in cost and therefore risk. Operating in month-to-month and metric based usage modes enhances the flexibility of the scheme further.

The new advertising campaign will be the third in a series that seeks to articulate the company's focus on helping customers to address real business issues. In fact the company has taken some effort to stress the ability of its licensing terms to supply customers with greater levels of control, whilst CA remains accountable for the both the software's smooth installation and, more importantly, customer satisfaction.

It is interesting to see the effort that CA is taking to communicate with its customer base on the potential inherent in the FlexSelect model. Whilst the company still offers traditional term-based licenses, the fact that the licensing scheme is available to operate over short time frames provides customers with significant freedom not usually found in software contracts. CA also claims that the legal and financial departments of customers find these contracts straightforward to understand.

CA is to be praised for its efforts to offer licensing alternatives that are more applicable to the dynamic, rapidly changing environment in which many businesses now operate. The efforts of organisations to take advantage of Utility computing architectures that can be turned on and off with user demand requires flexible software licensing offerings to be available in order to allow the exploitation of rapidly scalable IT infrastructures. CA's FlexSelect is a positive move in this direction.

Offering organisations flexibility and schemes to reduce long term risk are attractive and should help CA to continue its migration towards a financial model that looks at bringing in revenue on a recurring basis. It will be interesting to monitor the take up of these offerings and to see how CA's competitors react.