Consumption Based Software Licensing

I have been wondering when consumption-based licensing of software will become common. Everyone is doing it for infrastructure. AWS, Azure, and Google have made the practice ubiquitous across enterprises. Companies have benefited greatly being to move with agility to try out new ideas and innovate. They design for steady state but can easily scale to meet demand without additional investment. But software licensing has lagged behind this practice.

Software licensing forces companies into making staffing decisions based upon the cost of a seat. Users who might only occasionally use a license are excluded as a way to save money. To save money, you keep a dedicated team to use the software and as a result business processes become more complex and costly.

If the license was a consumption base model, companies would have the opportunity to let everyone have access to the system. You can have the best person for a task use the system rather than choosing a person with a license. Imagine the ability to bring additional employees onto a system to deal with an increase in transaction volumes without a long-term commitment. Companies could staff call centers with less employees and have employees on other teams help out with unexpected call surges.

Would your company benefit from consumption-based licensing? Would you be interested?