Sumit Dhawan has posted a blog entry describing licensing changes that Citrix has made in response to direct customer feedback. While I assumed that Citrix would eventually breakdown and agree to support additional licensing models, this is more comprehensive than I expected they would do. The models are now:
- Per user licensing (this is still per user and not named user)
- Per device licensing (XD can be used by unlimited users on a given device) – New option that’s great for factories, healthcare, shift workers, etc.
- Campus-wide licensing program – New option that would be great for educational markets and mirrors the model of Microsoft’s Campus licensing program
- New Edition of XenDesktop (VDI Edition) – Essentially what the old XenDesktop Advanced Edition was before it was killed off. This will include Citrix Provisioning Server, StorageLink for XenServer, and User Profile Management. This edition is capable of being licensed per user/per device or on a CCU (concurrent user basis). The trick here is that the CCU model requires the $199/ccu sticker price. This effectively means that there is no longer a CCU option at $99/user (which is what the old Standard Edition was). Citrix claims this is due to not a lot of customer uptake of the Standard Edition product. While that may be the case, Standard Edition was perfect for those who wanted just the ICA protocol and weren’t interested in doing Provisioning Server, etc. If this is the worst of the licensing changes, I suppose customers will have to deal with this and just accept it. It certain puts customers in a much better place.
All of the above being said, it’ll be VERY interesting to see how the licensing happens for all of this. There’s already some licensing challenges and now that there’s multiple different license types available, it’ll be interesting to see how these licenses get deployed, allocated, revoked and troubleshot.
All in all a prettty good move by Citrix.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know with a comment...