License.Rocks to Tokenise $14.3 Billion Software Licensing Market

A case study on OST Partner Company license.rocks

Let’s talk about software licensing. Embedded, Cloud-based, on-premise. Business to business, business to consumer. Billing integration, usage tracking… Not exactly a conversation starter, is it? That is until you realise the sheer size of this under-appreciated market:

The global software licensing market is expected to reach $14.3 Billion by 2023, a compound annual growth rate of 8,5% between 2017 and 2023.

Source: Market Research Future

Looking at regional market shares, the Europeans take the cake: Europe is expected to account for the largest market share of $204M by 2020; with Germany making up the bulk of the market with 25% market share.

Visual courtesy of marketresearch.biz

The North American market is expected to achieve the biggest CAGR of more than 10%, with the Asian-Pacific market likely to follow suit, as major players like China and India are “less mature in enforcing IP rights, and more prone to under-licensing,” according to a report published by MarketResearch in January 2018.

With so many licenses sold, one may wonder what happens to those agreements when a company ceases its operations (M&A, insolvency), or when a project simply gets migrated to cloud-based software. Turns out there’s an entire industry dedicated to giving licensed software a second lease of life, and it may well be the fastest grower in the realm of software licensing.