ULS IS A COMPREHENSIVE LICENSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM THAT SUPPORTs A WIDE VARIETY OF PRODUCTS.
The Universal Licensing System (ULS) is a powerful, secure and reliable license management system hosted by CommScope PKI Center™.
It is used to generate feature licenses for products that are designed to support more capability than their shipped configuration allows.
Licenses are generated by or for customers that wish to increase the capability of a product that they own.
The system is designed to be highly customizable and extensible to support wide-ranging needs in various aspects of feature licensing, such as product and feature definition, license generation and replacement, feature credit management and reporting.
The system is hosted in a highly-available infrastructure to support licensing operations anywhere, anytime.
Feature Highlights
A ULS feature license can be used to turn on or off and set the maximum capacity of product features. ULS allows flexible product feature definition for products' evolving feature set and license sales model. ULS supports licenses that can be applied to a single device, a group of devices of the same kind, or even a system comprised of devices of different kinds. ULS also supports licenses for pure software products that may run in the cloud. Products supported by ULS include TV set-top box, CMTS, edge QAM, video encoder/decoder/transcoder, satellite receiver, conditional access server, network controller, advertisement manager, service scheduler, etc.
ULS supports a wide range of license generation scenarios, including low and large volume production in factory with manual or automatic license generation, individual product upgrade by customers, mass product rollout and upgrade with automatic license generation over the Internet, product repair and replacement in service centers. The ULS web-based user interface provides users with an easy way of generating licenses on-demand and accessing previously generated licenses.
ULS provides powerful license credit management to both product teams and customers. It is integrated with the CommScope sales order system and supports both pre-paid and post-paid licenses. It keeps a complete audit trail of all license credit transactions. License credits in ULS are segregated according to customers' operational structures, and can be moved across different organizations to support customer site consolidation or company merger and acquisition. Product teams and customers can gain insights into their licensing activities through a set of standard reports available on the ULS web site or custom reports available through the ULS operations team.
ULS supports very granular control of user access, only allowing users access to the licensing assets that they need access to. Users in ULS are assigned different access scope based on their job duties, as well as one or more roles that give them different capabilities in ULS. Product team and customer users with certain user roles can also manage roles and access scope of the users who are on their team, enabling them to respond immediately to urgent access requests from their team members.
The authenticity and integrity of licenses from ULS is guaranteed by hardware-based security mechanism and stringent secure operation procedures. ULS licenses are cryptographically protected against tampering. ULS supports many license binding mechanisms based on different product security requirements and deployment scenarios. ULS also supports secure processes for license upgrade, downgrade and removal.
ULS runs on the infrastructure of CommScope PKI Center™ that provides a wide range of services to a global user base as well as more than 40 manufacturing and operator facilities around the world on a 24x7x365 basis. As the services provided by CommScope PKI Center™ are mission-critical to its customers, its infrastructure is designed and built to be highly available, with a state-of-the-art virtualization platform that has built-in high-availability, redundant network connections, hot stand-by backup power supply, and a remote disaster recovery site. ULS itself is being constantly monitored by automatic system health monitoring software as well as an operations team reachable by phone and email 24x7.