Global Protection is a major concern amongst European ISV’s

Released on = March 3, 2005, 8:46 am

Press Release Author = Veronica Fredriksen, MediaDev

Industry = Software

Press Release Summary = Security Protection have increased among European ISV's through the past 12 months, MediaDev's study reveals

Press Release Body = London, 3rd March, 2005 - Global figures provided by the BSA (Business Software Association) statistical research institute show that nearly 36% of software solutions are installed from pirate / illegal copies of applications. At European level, this figure increases to 50%. MediaDev conducted a survey amongst European software publishers to assess how they are tackling the issue.

We interviewed 1000 ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) in Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy. 70% of publishers we interviewed had some form of piracy
prevention solution in place. We found German ISVs to be best protected with 75.86% having some form of anti piracy solution, this figure stood at 75.36% in France, 70.18% in Italy and 57.14% in the UK.

This study assesses the impact of the threat of piracy in Europe. We focus on the threat as perceived by the ISV, the solutions implemented to protect from the threat and the impact that size, distribution model and region have when selecting anti piracy solutions.

Size of the company, a determining factor?

"Small" ISVs
Within smaller ISVs (1 to 10 developers), we observe a general tendency (more than 75% of those interviewed) in Germany, France and Italy to have some form of protection from piracy.

In the UK nearly two thirds of small companies questioned had no protection. The reason given for this shortfall was primarily that the development projects worked on by these teams were too small to justify development or procurement of a security solution. Lesser protection in the UK can also be explained through the fact that it is one of the least affected countries (source BSA). As the threat is smaller the
installation of piracy prevention solutions is less critical.

Of those small ISVs who do employ an anti piracy solution there are two main types utilised. In France and Italy more than 66% of choose to make users authenticate via
a password and/or a key. In the UK and Germany software protection solutions are used to a greater extent with more than two thirds of small ISVs using a third party provider.

More developers, more protection
As we would expect, as the size of the ISV increases, so too does the tendency to deploy some form of anti piracy solution. 20% of ISVs employing between 10 and 50
developers do not employee any anti piracy solution. This figure falls to 10% for ISVs employing between 50 and 100 developers. We found no instances of ISVs employing over 100 developers with unprotected applications.

The larger German and UK based ISVs remain faithful to commercial security solution with more than 75% utilising a third party provider. We found bespoke anti piracy solution development and encoding to be equally popular amongst the remaining ISVs in these regions.

Italy maintains a strong preference for authentication with 66% of ISVs using this method of protection.

French results also remained consistent with findings for small ISVs in that region. ISVs select authentication by password and/or key (58.33%). However, a encoding proves strong second choice with a third of vendors in the 10 – 100 developers bracket selecting this method of protection.

Distribution Model

Regardless of region, the method of distribution employed by an ISV clearly has an impact on the nature of the anti piracy solution selected. We look at CD, ASP model, client-based installations and downloads.

CD
ISVs distributing applications on CDs mainly select software solutions (27.59%). In-house, bespoke development is a close second (19.54%) followed by the authentication by key or password (16.09%) and encoding (14.94%). 21.84% of European ISVs employing this distribution method have no protection against piracy.

ASP Model
ASP providers also predominantly select software solutions (38.24%).