WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The leading software intelligence solutions provider, V.i. Laboratories, Inc. (“V.i. Labs”), today announced the company achieved record growth in 2010 as Independent Software Vendor (ISV) customers relied on CodeArmor Intelligence data for revenue recovery across compliance, sales and marketing teams. While furthering its leadership in helping to combat software piracy, V.i. Labs grew its customer base by 100 percent. The Company also reached a major milestone by identifying more than $800 million in unlicensed software revenue pipeline for its top customers in 2010 alone.
According to the latest Business Software Alliance/IDC Global Software Study, software theft exceeded $51 billion in commercial value in 2009. Based on aggregate customer data, V.i. Labs has found that the BSA/IDC piracy rate may in fact be too conservative and underestimating the true number of losses due to piracy. Data from sample CodeArmor Intelligence deployments also reveals:
- Customers report top line growth up to 25 percent directly from recovered revenue using CodeArmor Intelligence.
- Roughly half of the estimated revenue loss is actually a result of license overuse by active customers – additional copies of software they simply haven’t paid for. The other half is overt piracy coming from what can be labeled “prospective” customers.
- Besides the well-publicized piracy rates in China, Russia and Taiwan, the U.S. and Germany make up the top five geographies. The top 10 (including France, Canada and Great Britain) are listed on V.i. Labs’ Stat Watch page.
- Customers can achieve conversion rates (the rate at which an ISV can turn a non-compliant organization into a paying customer) of up to 75-95 percent, depending on the ISV’s recovery processes and the geographic region where the infringements occurred.
“Major ISVs have embraced the CodeArmor Intelligence strategy for their products over costly, outdated methods and drawn-out legal practices. In 2010 our customers confirmed that using hard data through detection and reporting is a much easier way of converting infringing organizations into compliant customers,” said Joseph Noonan, president and CEO of V.i. Labs. “Their recovery of significant revenue proves that piracy business intelligence is the largest new opportunity for software companies in 2011.”
During a year when many organizations struggled to find new customers and create leads, V.i. Labs championed the initiative for turning organizations using pirated software into paying customers. CodeArmor is no longer only for high-value software vendors; in June the company launched GetVisi.com, a SaaS-based intelligence solution for small and mid-sized ISVs seeking visibility into the use and misuse of their software. GetVisi.com contains functionality that tracks trial download usage, feature adoption and the use of pirated software by geography. To address the large market of software vendors with piracy problems, V.i. Labs expanded its direct sales teams for CodeArmor Intelligence and GetVisi.com.
“Our customers view piracy business intelligence as a way of growing their license revenues and building long term customer relationships without getting involved in legal proceedings,” said Victor DeMarines, vice president of Products, V.i. Labs. “There are many companies that are loyal and committed ‘customers’ using a wide range of pirated applications that they rely on to conduct their business. We’re providing ISVs with the solutions, data, and best practices to convert those companies into legitimate customers.”
2010 Highlights and Milestones
Fueled by increasing piracy rates, V.i. Labs recognized the need to enhance its own products and strategy to provide ISVs with the best solutions that would give them greater scalability and deeper piracy detection options for their own products:
- In May, the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) CODiE Awards recognized the CodeArmor platform as the Best Digital Rights Management (DRM) Solution of the year.
- In June, V.i. Labs brought piracy business intelligence to small and mid-sized ISVs with the launch of SaaS-based CodeArmor Intelligence Online and introduced GetVisi.com to give a broader range of ISVs a solution with such capabilities as software usage reporting, trial download tracking and piracy detection and reporting.
- In September, the newest version of CodeArmor Intelligence was introduced, giving ISVs with high piracy rates greater scalability and deeper detection options. CodeArmor Intelligence 3.0 provides ISVs with visibility they need to track, detect and report on software use and misuse.
- In conjunction with the launch of CodeArmor Intelligence 3.0, V.i. Labs announced that the product was built on Force.com, salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud computing platform, bringing piracy business intelligence to the cloud.
- Later in September, V.i. Labs introduced the Piracy Revenue Pipeline, a perpetually increasing number that represents real data aggregated from a sample of CodeArmor Intelligence customers on the potential actionable revenue from unlicensed use of their products. To date, V.i. Labs has uncovered more than $800 million in potential revenue for its customers.
- In October, V.i. Labs bolstered its executive leadership team with the appointment of Jim Nauen to Vice President of Global Sales.
- The Software Piracy Initiatives Forum sponsored by V.i. Labs on LinkedIn continued to grow and now has close to 200 members sharing and discussing the latest news and trends in responding to software piracy.
- And throughout the year, a series of webinars detailed marketing opportunities of software piracy, educating attendees about how pirates are potential sales leads and discussing the impact of software piracy on an ISV’s bottom line. All webinars can be viewed by visiting: http://www.vilabs.com/news-events/events-and-webinars
About V.i. Laboratories (V.i. Labs)
V.i. Labs offers companies actionable intelligence on the use and misuse of their software to increase revenue. Its CodeArmor® platform tracks software use, protects valuable code from theft and tampering, and helps companies recover revenue lost to the use of unlicensed software and piracy. CodeArmor is used by leading software producers to protect more than $5 billion in revenues. V.i. Labs is privately held and headquartered in Waltham, Mass. For more information, please visit www.vilabs.com, follow us on Twitter (@vilabs), or read our blog, Code Confidential.
V.i. Labs also sponsors the Software Piracy Initiatives Forum on LinkedIn. The forum was created to give software vendors a venue for discussing these issues and to share their experiences to minimize piracy's impact on the industry.
©2011 V.i. Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. V.i. Labs, the V.i. Labs logo, and CodeArmor are trademarks or registered trademarks of V.i. Laboratories, Inc. All other product and brand names herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.