New License Model coming September 2020

We would like to express our gratitude to our existing educational clients and commercial partners for placing their trust in the Simbound online learning services during the recent lockdown. While there is still some uncertainty regarding how universities will function beginning in September 2020, we are pleased to be able to provide you with the assurance that the Simbound team is on standby and continues to develop and provide support for the world's first digital marketing simulation platform used in courses delivered both online and offline.

The feedback we have received from the market recently has encouraged us at Simbound to continue providing the highest quality educational online services and resources. In light of changes in the wider education environment, including new teaching conditions that come with both new time and budget constraints, we are adapting our services to meet these challenges.

Today, we are opening a discussion on new potential avenues for licensing our proprietary simulation content and services. As pioneers in online education of digital marketing with simulations, we are now ready to present an entirely new licensing model. This is a first for the business education industry using experiential learning tools and is certainly one of the most flexible and high-performance EdTech licensing options available on the market. We hope that this will motivate other educational simulations providers to provide a matching level of service. We invite clients and other industry colleagues to familiarize themselves with the approach to licensing and contribute their views or express their wishes for new functionality which we will later include in an extended article.

Why we think micro-licensing software is the future of Educational Technology

The envisioned pay-as-you-go system will be able to align costs with actual software usage, promoting transparency and financial efficiency in the licensing of educational technology. Simbound invites clients to explore this new model, which is poised to redefine software licensing in the education industry.

The proposed pay-as-you-go system is straightforward yet game-changing. In essence, credits are acquired in advance and then converted into simulation decisions. Your course participants will utilize the new credits as they operate the features of the simulation platform, allowing them to assess their investment against their progress and learning more effectively. Once the credits have been consumed, additional credits must be purchased in order to continue running the simulation. The introduction of the new credits-based system allows you to allocate financial resources to a single user action, ensuring that the financial commitment aligns with the actual level of usage of our software. This is a unique and valuable feature that is not available with traditional software acquisition budgets. This approach is efficient, transparent, and leads to predictable costs, aligning with the principles of software-as-a-service.
 
If you've used Simbound before, you can test this new system for your upcoming courses. Learn more about business simulation software licensing in this resource. .

Introducing Simbound User Credits

The new credit-based licensing model has emerged in response to changes observed in the broader educational landscape. It differs from the decades-old annual subscription or site-wide software license models, which typically involve a one-time payment and provide access to all software features for all users within an organization. While these legacy licensing models have historically been effective, they may not be as suitable in today's environment, where there are often multiple alternatives to each software solution.

However, licensing as software for unlimited usage and for all of the users of a school poses significant challenges to software expenditure plans. For instance, a category of users who do not utilize the newly acquired software renders part of the license suboptimal. The new credit-based licensing system from Simbound eliminates the sunk cost associated with software. This gives purchasing managers full control of software-related allowances and expenses, allowing for more precise management of software usage patterns and diverse user populations each with their own learning behaviour and preference. In other words, the introduction of credits will prevent software cost overruns and act as a stopwatch for educational technology usage and efficiency.

This is yet another innovative development from Simbound. We believe it will have a defining impact on the future of licensing in the educational software industry, while also redefining how licensing is carried out in other software industries. It is our policy that no one should be required to pay for digital content unless they are actively using it. We recommend our esteemed clients to rethink the way they manage their software licensing needs and contact us to learn how they can begin converting their existing licenses to the new credit-based licensing system. This will help us promote fair business practices across the entire educational software industry.

We'll have more updates soon, so stay tuned! Enjoy your summer vacation and we'll see you soon in one of our upcoming digital marketing simulation courses.