Independent software vendors: How many businesses are pirating your software, and what can you do about it? The latest version of a software intelligence tool from V.i. Laboratories, CodeArmor Intelligence 3.0, aims to help companies identify organizations that use their software without paying.

What happens next? The software is aimed not at penalizing, but remediating. In other words, if people at a company are already using unlicensed copies of a vendor's software, oftentimes all it takes is a sales call to get a company to pay its license fees. To that end, the new version of CodeArmor Intelligence is now built on the Force.com platform, enabling companies to pipe piracy data directly to salespeople's Salesforce.com dashboards, as well as to use it to run business intelligence reports.

Joseph Noonan, president and CEO of V.i. Labs, said that the software allows independent software vendors "to make data-driven decisions about which companies to pursue first, or which geographical regions require the most attention."

The new version of CodeArmor Intelligence also adds support for Visual Studio 2010 environments and offers expanded piracy detection capabilities, including detecting software running on virtual machines. In addition, by using the Facebook-like Salesforce.com social networking tool, Chatter, salespeople can now launch discussions around specific CodeArmor piracy report results.

According to a study sponsored by the Business Software Alliance and conducted by IDC, the global commercial value of unlicensed software was $54.1 billion in 2009. Of that, the firms in the United States accounted for $8.4 billion. But high-level statistics don't help vendors identify exactly which organizations are infringing their software licenses.

To that end, CodeArmor Intelligence can help them gather piracy intelligence. First, the software vendor inserts a snippet of code into its application. From there, the application channels information back to CodeArmor whenever it detects an unlicensed copy. Collected data can help companies identify specific organizations that are pirating their software, and in some cases even specific machines or users. They can also track how that piracy rate increases or decreases over time, and quantify their exact lost revenue by company or geography.

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