When evaluating a property software provider, the licensing model is an important consideration. The Veco™ model, based on concurrent licensing, is a significant benefit to its customers and a clear distinction from other providers.

Concurrent Licences

The Veco™ concurrent licensing model is based on simultaneous operator usage.

Estate agency organisations only need software licences for the number of operators who will be logged into the Veco™ software at one time. Furthermore, once logged in, each operator can assist as
many customers as needed while only utilising a single licence.

In national companies with “follow-the-sun” processing centres, sharing licences across multiple teams or business units can cut costs drastically.

Concurrent licensing also promotes a clean and accurate audit trail. With Veco™, an estate agency organisation can create an unlimited number of account names – all of which have their own session data – for clear drill-down reporting and monitoring.

Concurrent Licences:
• Purchase licences based on simultaneous usage
• Designed for follow-the-sun, processing operations
• Create unlimited named accounts

Named Licences or “Seats”

Predominantly, other estate agency software providers sell named software licences or “named seats,” which link a single user account to a single licence. This forces the organisation to purchase a licence for each operator who may need access to the software. The cost of named seats adds up quickly, especially in processing centres where many users access the software.

Practically, as a result of these costs, named seats can introduce security risks. Under the pressure to cut costs, organisations may be forced to create generic logins – user accounts with a user name and
password that are shared by multiple operators.

Generic logins make it impossible to tie reporting data to specific users for a valid audit trail. When the estate agency organisation experiences staff turnover, ensuring unauthorised personnel no longer have access to systems becomes a difficult task. The risk assumed by generic logins is not worth the price of a data breach.

Named Seats:
• Purchase 1 licence per user account
• Not conducive to “follow-the-sun” operations
• Pressure to create generic logins

Veco™ Sales Director Richard Murray comments:

“We have been delivering concurrent user licensing since the first versions of our ‘Eurolink’ software and strongly believe this is the fairest way to deliver licensing in our market. With a one off cost based on the number of users accessing the software at any one time this allows for departments and companies to share a pool of licenses. With users accessing the software at their desk, remotely or via tablets and smart phones the number of licenses will need to be determined up front but can easily be topped up as required. I find it difficult to understand how a supplier can justify a ‘per user’ or ‘per seat’ model commonly known as ‘named seat licensing’ in the property industry (or any for that matter).

“What this translates to is a business model which effectively will only grow in licensing revenue the less efficient the software is. Surely the idea of any software is to make a business more efficient and be able to process more business transactions with the same head count? Without this return on investment it would make little or no sense to change software in the first place.”