Next Generation Licensing

ARM are a silicon IP design company whose core products are the designs (IP) for low power processors. ARM's customers include companies such as Samsung and Apple who use ARM's IP to develop processors and peripheral ICs to power their mobile products. Devices based on ARM IP require the development of specific software. To support this, ARM have either develop or acquired software development kits and associated tools that developers can use to speed up their projects. These supporting software tools are licensed to either individuals as well as large companies.

To manage licenses, ARM have a dedicated team of professionals who process most of the requests as tickets to support licensing requests, as well as detect and avoid license abuse. Manually processing licensing issues is very labour intensive, often repetitive and results in delays between requests and responses which, in most cases are too long. ARM therefore decided to develop a self-service portal that would be able to handle large volumes of requests, cope with the wide variety of products as well as the different license models and prevent the fraudulent use of licenses.

Enabling customers to self service their licensing needs cannot be solved by simply developing a web portal in isolation. An optimal solution would need to be based on a deeper understanding of the development process and the role and use of the tools within this by a team of developers, as well as those ARM customer stakeholders who are responsible for managing and purchasing licenses. Considering and validating the experience journey rather than the requirements of 'just' a visitor to the self-serve licensing portal is core to the way in which Akendi addressed this challenge.

Our approach led to us define the information architecture based on the different licensing models, products and features the portal needs to support as part of the overall journey. The final architecture modelled all information and functions the portal needs to offer over the next 3 years.

We identified, in collaboration with ARM, what functionality is required for a first minimum viable product (MVP), before designing low fidelity prototypes that demonstrated how a potential solution could meet the customer requirements as defined in the portal.