Patent ID: 7925635

Claim:
A method of providing information about software usage, comprising: on each of a plurality of first computer systems: automatically identifying, for each of a plurality of computer software applications, at least one first time at which an operation of said computer software application was detected to have been started; automatically identifying, for each of the plurality of computer software applications at least one second time at which the operation of said computer software application was detected to have been stopped, wherein the act of identifying, for each of a plurality of computer software applications, at least one second time comprises: making a first request to and receiving from an operating system, a first set of identifiers of a plurality of programs running at approximately the time of said first request; making a second request to and receiving from the operating system, at a time later than a time of the first request, a second set of identifiers of a plurality of programs running at approximately the time of said second request; and for a given one of the plurality of computer software applications: locating an identifier of the given one of the plurality of computer software applications in the first set of identifiers; and not locating the identifier of the given one of the plurality of computer software applications in the second set of identifiers; and storing said first and second times in at least one record associated with an identifier of said computer software application; and on a second computer system, receiving a query regarding the at least one record and providing at least one result to the query responsive to a plurality of the at least one records from at least two of the plurality of first computer systems.