Vision and logic. Background story.
The VisLogic company was founded in the year 2000 using the Lan-Inspector to herald the new age of license management.
Emerged from the idea of an automated LAN inventorisation, Szenessy and collegues investigated about copyright paragraphs in the libraries
of the university of Berlin earlier in the year 1999.
Germany´s §100 UrhG was subsumed to: The owner or responsible person of a company is liable for any copyright offences of the salaried personnel, even if he does not know
about it and furthermore, if it happens explicitly against his will.
The result of these investigations was a written piece of text that was confirmed by a lawyer and published via the former VisLogic web site.
The importance of this niche market was remarkable. Various big license resellers made an effort to work together with VisLogic.
They wanted to use the Lan-Inspector for their customers' license audits. They wanted to scan networks and the missing office
licenses were supposed to generate quick returns.
The management was quite astonished as they got hold of a standard quote for a license audit. Germany's second largest license reseller had sent quotes
to customers, including an appendix with the upper text, directly copied from the VisLogic web site. They had taken the arguments for license management
from VisLogic itself...
After the fascinating company start of VisLogic, other companies began to participate in license management services.
The german domain www.lizenz-management.de was very attractive these days, but Szenessy had
already registered it much earlier. A bunch of large companies even tried to threaten VisLogic via their lawyers to get hold of that domain, of course
without any legal basis. They all sensed a profitable business.
The customers gave a pet name to the Lan-Inspector calling it 'Lani'. After nine years of productive existance the Lani continues to support Windows95 as
well as Vista or the latest server operating systems. It supports 32 bit systems and 64 bit systems, even itanium (ia64) systems are supported by Version 4.0.
During the years the inventory scan-engine was lewered to a high maturity level that allows to scan any heterogenuous network and achieve the wanted results.
Within the Lan-Inspector V5.0 VisLogic combines inventorisation, usage analysis and license management functions.
A package that is capable to open up unique cost saving potentials. The usage analysis enables a complete optimization of running license agreements:
Other tools will only tell you how many licenses you need to be legally secure. The Lani shows with ease, what is installed, but furthermore what
software is seldomly or not used at all. But even more than that, the Lani also calculates the cost saving potential for the next license agreement year.
Why wasting an 'office' license, if nobody ever uses it? Why a full 'MS Office', if only 'MS Word' is used?
The one-pieced, square stripe, that suspensefully draws on itself to rise over its boundaries - is much
more than a diagonal within a square!
This was the unanimous opinion of the management during the foundation phase of the company. The logo itself was already registered for more than a year as
a word and figurative mark within Germany's patent register. The 'bank' also had awarded the VisLogic company for its business plan
and granted 5000 Euro for it. By the way the first page of the business plan was dominated by a large bold picture of that logo.
Two years later the bank began to complain about the logo to prohibit VisLogic the usage of it. They started with astonishing threats and continued with
crude instructions to deform the logo. After another two years both parties agreed on the fact that VisLogic will not use the logo for any self-produced financial software, but is allowed to register the mark European-wide.
Anyway, banks like to use the Lan-Inspector for their networks.
