Tag Archives: licensing

Ideal Software Licensing Model – Requirements Collection

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I’m looking for some feedback and thoughts from the community to help define a reasonable Licensing Model that takes Physical & Virtual into account.  From my view as a client I don’t think this is all that complicated at the end of the day.

More discussions with some vendors around licensing and I’m finding more and more that the following two axioms are defining these discussions:

  • Vendors want to get paid for their software (obviously the most they can be).   They are not stupid in most cases.
  • Clients want to pay for what they use (obviously the least they have to).   They are not stupid in most cases.

The challenges come from the fact that Vendors don’t get the following generally:

  • A VM in VMware is limited in processing to the vCPUs it has.
  • A vCPU is limited to what a given core is individually capable of.
  • More clients might be willing to use your software if I didn’t need to pay for 12 cores of power when I only need 2 today.
  • VMotion of a VM does not mean I’m suddenly gaining more cores of processing.

Clients get upset cause of the following items:

  • When a Vendor assumes I’m an idiot and can pull the wool over my eyes.   This a good relationship does not make.
  • A Vendor goes and says a Virtual does less than a physical, then charges me more if it is virtual.
  • A Vendor requires me to license this big physical box and I only want a couple cores worth or less than # of cores in physical box.
  • I want to use your software and because I’m running it as a virtual you want to charge me more.  I can’t even buy smaller physicals to use your software within my software budget (smallest thing I can buy within reason today is an 8 core system and I only need 2 cores worth).
  • A Vendor limits me to some physical box even though the OS/Software will be on a virtual machine.   (Who cares what physical box is on it as long as I pay for the CPU MHz I’m using?  Your software doesn’t.  Only your legal does.)
  • If I buy a lot of your software you can cut me deals since I’m spending a lot of money with you and then I’ll be interested in licensing models by physical cores or just a volume level discount.  I’d rather not start there if I can avoid it.
  • We’ve seen what happens to good tech when licensing models can’t take tech into account.   See the Mainframe and Computer Associates licensing stubbornness in the 80s contribute significantly to the rise of the distributed computing space.  We don’t want to deal with that migration if we can avoid it.

So there’s some of the requirements I have come up with.   What other requirements/gotchas can you think of that have got you in dealing with vendors?   Anything different when dealing with Solaris or AIX or HP/UX virtualization?

Business Objects is Virtualization/MultiCore Stupid

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Recently I have been involved in discussions internally on what it will take to get Business Objects onto a Virtual Machine.   The main talk has been around potentially removing another equivalent product and moving entirely over to Business Objects.   Then we got pricing for Business Objects.  

The standard piece of hardware today is pretty hefty even a small 1/2U system.   They come with multiple cores.   You have to do a special order to get anything less than a dual/quad core today.   An enterprise doesn’t order single sockets either.   Kinda silly to save $500 when you can have 2x the power and be able to reuse this system in the future for other purposes.  

They price and only price by physical cores in a system and on all systems their software could potentially run on.  

Business Objects is blowing a potential sale since today we only need something like 6-8 cores worth of power today and making these systems into VMs is ideal.   It isn’t like Enterprises are out to “screw” vendors.   Yes we all want a deal though Enterprises just want to pay for what they use.   If they would just license use of ~8 CPUs (virtual or physical or core) and let us make these VMs they win.  

Even for us to make these physical is a joke.    We have to disable cores and sockets to make us legal.  

So.. BO is blowing it.   They need to grow up and stop making Mainframe’s look cheap with their licensing policies.

AppSpeed update

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I’ve had the AppSpeed demo setup and running in one of my clusters.   When you get the demo temporary license, its for 16 cores worth.   My smallest environment to test in is 160 cores deep.

I figured no issue, I’ll just see what I get for a couple different apps to see how it works.   That didn’t work out so well either.   Any actually interesting app is multi-tier which happens to bounce across multiple cores/hosts in the environment.

So I haven’t forgotten and I’m not ignoring the statement.   I’ve put in a request for a temporary license of 160 cores worth and I’m waiting for that to come through.   3 weeks and waiting now.

I’ve had the AppSpeed demo setup and running in one of my clusters.   When you get the demo temporary license, its for 16 cores worth.   My smallest environment to test in is 160 cores deep.

I figured no issue, I’ll just see what I get for a couple different apps to see how it works.   That didn’t work out so well either.   Any actually interesting app is multi-tier which happens to bounce across multiple cores/hosts in the environment.

So I haven’t forgotten and I’m not ignoring the statement.   I’ve put in a request for a temporary license of 160 cores worth and I’m waiting for that to come through.   3 weeks and waiting now.