Evaluation of Software License Management Frameworks for Grid Environments : The Four Ts for Agile Systems

Abstract: Business Agility could be the means to survive in a competitive environment of continuous andunanticipated change and to respond quickly to rapidly changing, fragmenting global markets that are catered by competitors. To leverage the potential benefits of Business Agility, many companies use Information Technology as a major force for augmenting their agility. The topic of increasing Business Agility through Information Technology has been pervasively studied in research papers. And in the context of this thesis, we will investigate research papers in order to develop an evaluation model for facilitating making informed decisions regarding agile Information Systems in computational Grid environments. The Information Systems in this thesis will focus on license management systems, which is an intricate but coherently integrated blend of many different modules compiled as a technical solution that enables software license management. We will use our evaluation model to compare license management frameworks, easily grasped as a draft for a license management system, for Grid environments and also underpin it with a case study on an in-use license management system in order to strengthen its business applicability. The research was conducted as a qualitative comparison and a case study, combining both research papers and a real business context in order to fulfill the goals and purposes of this thesis. The results of the analysis implies that most of the license management frameworks for Grid environments lacks various details needed for making a feasible implementation in a certain business context, whilst those that have been trialed in a real business situation fulfilled almost every aspect of our evaluation model. The conclusion drawn is that our evaluation model is a seemingly good start for making informed decisions when choosing or designing an agile license management system for Grid environments