Kärcher Cleans Up Software Licensing with an Adobe ETLA, Mobilizing for Growth

It’s an important but not necessarily a sexy topic: managing software licenses. Yet it’s a complex puzzle that must be solved by virtually every company, especially ones growing as quickly as Kärcher.

For the cleaning equipment manufacturer, managing software licenses was becoming increasingly difficult due to the number of new employees joining the company worldwide. After working to standardize its software environment and centralize license management, Kärcher entered into a three-year Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA) with Adobe for Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

The ability to create PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC at Kärcher is essential for everything from generating user documentation to supporting marketing and advertising efforts. With a flexible ETLA, the company can now provide this core capability for its growing workforce with greater agility and more predictable costs.

An agreement that scales with the business

Kärcher added 500 new hires just last year, and growth shows no signs of stopping. For the dynamic company, there’s really no way to predict its exact software needs years or even months ahead of time. Kärcher must be able to respond to new demands and deploy Adobe Acrobat Pro DC licenses as needs arise.

The ETLA supports unexpected growth by providing a flexible licensing limit, which means Kärcher can add users beyond its projected numbers without requiring an entirely new agreement. Equally important is the predictability offered by the Adobe ETLA. No matter how much of unexpected demand there is for Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Kärcher pays a set amount, only paying for more licenses when the agreement expires.

In addition, deploying licenses to people anywhere in the world is managed from a central point, greatly streamlining IT administration. The company can even shift licenses — among users, workstations, and devices — to keep up with the changing ways employees work.

A “lean and clean” approach to licensing

According to Achim Höfel, IT service manager global at Kärcher, “The Adobe ETLA is not the standard licensing approach in the market yet. While more software partners offer flexible licensing models, other companies handle additional licenses in a variety of ways, and that method usually isn’t as lean and clean as it is with Adobe.”

It’s a unique approach in the marketplace, and one that has Kärcher thinking about the future. Inspired by its initial success, the company is looking to apply ETLAs to other Adobe products its employees use, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe Premiere Pro. As the experience at Kärcher shows, enterprise software license management doesn’t have to be messy, even in times of growth.

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