Asset management tools provider Centennial Software is lowering the entry point for its data protection solution from 25 to five seats. The product, DeviceWall, provides encryption so that data that slips out by today’s version of SneakerNet (e.g., via memory keys) can be made unintelligible to unauthorized users. As part of the SMB offering, the company is ramping up efforts with VAR channels in the Microsoft space, and is piloting online sales.

It will be priced at $300 per seat with annual support of $400. What’s surprising is that the company is not taking the opportunity of opening to a new market to provide the kind of subscription pricing model that would best appeal to it. “The ideas never came up in business planning,” admitted marketing VP Matt Fisher. 

Additionally, Centennial has issued a major upgrade to License Manager, a product that it introduced less than a year ago. Specifically, it is adding support for Microsoft’s Software Assurance program, the contract where customers get automatic free version upgrades. The difficulty, according to Fisher, is that such programs also provide rights to buy unrelated products as part of cross-selling promotions. Centennial cracked the problem by building an online catalog with household names like Microsoft, Adobe, and Symantec, to build the matrix. Then, the customer enters the terms of their license agreement, and the online catalog figures out the rest – that is, what versions of which products the customer is entitled to.

On the horizon, Centennial plans further integration of License Manager with its core asset discovery tools.

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