Licensing and Virtual Environments
New technology innovations often make customers question policies and practices in the software industry. With the advent of multi-core chips as well as virtualization, customers are asking for new software licensing models. While there may not be any single solution that works for all ISVs and all customers, alternative licensing approaches have been introduced by many ISVs.
Licensing Models
In the past few years, ISVs seeking to grow with the virtualization market have introduced new models, such as per instance, per user, and equivalency ratios (vCPU:CPU).
ISV Licensing Concerns Are Being Addressed
Many ISVs are concerned about the impact virtualization could have on their pricing models, but many of the stated concerns are being addressed. For example, some of the concerns that ISVs raise also exist in physical deployments: ability to clone software, creating remote copies, and other such proliferations. Additionally, customers are establishing control mechanisms to ensure proper accounting of their use of software (provisioning portals, consumption monitors, etc). And innovation is also helping out: management tools are able to track the use of software in virtual environments, with the advent of virtual machine lifecycle management tools, virtual machine monitoring, and other functions
Download “ISV Licensing in Virtualized Environments”, a VMware whitepaper that talks about adapting your licensing model to preserve or enhance existing price-to-value relationships when your products are deployed in virtualized environments.
Also available as a free download is “Virtualization Licensing and Support Lethargy: Curing the Disease That Stalls Virtualization Adoption” written by Chris Wolf of the Burton Group. This white paper makes a strong case for software vendors to define virtualization-compatible licensing and support policies right away, given the extensive adoption of server virtualization in the majority of enterprises.
