"Case Study: Fair Isaac Corporation"

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"The Orion Network License Server Platform enables you to implement these functions:
- As an Internet-based Product Activation Server
- As an Internet-based License Key Distribution Server
- As a scalable, high-availability Floating License Server "
Source: Agilis Software

Resources Related to Case Study: Fair Isaac Corporation:

• License manager (Wikipedia)

Case Study: Fair Isaac Corporation

Fair Isaac offers usage-based licensing on disconnected systems with Agilis's Orion Network Licensing Platform

Fair Isaac Corporation's FICO® scores are the most widely used consumer credit scores in the world, with more than 100 billion scores sold since their introduction in 1989. First released in the U.S., the FICO® score has since become the global industry standard for objective, profitable risk assessment.

The FICO® score analyzes and summarizes credit bureau information into a highly predictive risk assessment, allowing lenders to instantly and dramatically improve the quality of their lending decisions. Banks, credit card companies, lending institutions and international credit bureaus in 22 countries worldwide use the FICO® score to evaluate credit worthiness and risk.

Fair Isaac had been using a simple in-house license manager to protect new installations of the FICO® score, but as new implementations quickly spread around the world, they decided they needed a more sophisticated system for managing the licenses they sold worldwide. These licenses are based on the volume of scores calculated, with the volume being self-reported by the end-user. A major challenge with the product installations was that the typical end-customer has no direct Internet connectivity from the systems where the application is running and IT resources were limited due to a full workload and other high priority projects. Implementing Agilis software into the FICO® score software provided a relatively straightforward process requiring a minimal time commitment from IT, a secure licensing procedure and a periodic process for transferring data back to Fair Isaac in a quick and easy fashion for analysis.

In addition to the above, Fair Isaac also required comprehensive auditing and reporting mechanisms in the license server, for both operational and business intelligence purposes.

After reviewing the various licensing solutions on the market, Fair Isaac chose the Orion Network Licensing Platform from Agilis Software. "We liked the granularity Agilis offered with their offline activation approach", said Steve Delman, Software Development Senior Manager for the project. "They also supported a majority of our platform needs: multi-platform Java, C/C++ on Windows, Linux and Unix, and C#".

The architecture developed with Agilis comprises an Orion Server hosted at Fair Isaac, with the Orion client software integrated into the FICO® score application to perform the license verification and usage tracking at the customer site. The usage data is securely logged by the Orion client library on the customer's machine, and periodically uploaded to the hosted Orion Server using Orion's offline activation mechanism from any web browser. Each installation has multiple transaction counters tracking and time-stamping a variety of functions in the FICO® score solution.