Vendors set emergency remote access rates

Array Networks, Aventail and Citrix introduce flexible licensing plans for emergency situations.

Remote access vendors are introducing flexible licensing plans so when disasters like a potential bird-flu outbreak hit, businesses can temporarily increase the number of people working from home quickly and inexpensively.

Array Networks, Aventail and Citrix are all announcing plans where customers can buy extra licenses for weeks or months to deal with spikes in remote access use.

Array Networks is promoting its Business Continuity Plan in which customers sign up for the ability to use extra licenses on the fly as needed for a month at a time. By buying into the plan, customers can add as many concurrent users as they want up to the capacity of the Array SSL VPN gateway they own.

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Remote access vendors are introducing flexible licensing plans so when disasters like a potential bird-flu outbreak hit, businesses can temporarily increase the number of people working from home quickly and inexpensively.

Array Networks, Aventail and Citrix are all announcing plans where customers can buy extra licenses for weeks or months to deal with spikes in remote access use.

Array Networks is promoting its Business Continuity Plan in which customers sign up for the ability to use extra licenses on the fly as needed for a month at a time. By buying into the plan, customers can add as many concurrent users as they want up to the capacity of the Array SSL VPN gateway they own.

There is no start-up procedure for the plan. When demand for more concurrent users arises, customers just start using the VPN and get billed for the added users at the end of the month. Customers can either allow Array to tap into the gateways to find out how many concurrent users the machine supported in a given month or they can send Array a report generated by the gateway.

Array says it will have pricing for the service available later this week.

Aventail is introducing Aventail Spike License, which it describes as an insurance policy against short-term surges in remote-access demand.

Customers pay a flat fee up front and get a license for a given number of users that is good for either 30 or 90 days. They can turn the spike licenses on whenever they want to and they are good as long as the customer has a support contract in place.

So a customer who bought an Aventail EX 1500 SSL VPN gateway with 100 permanent licenses for $20,000 could buy 150 spike licenses good for 30 days for an extra $1,500. By comparison, upgrading an EX 1500 from 100 to 250 users using Aventail's regular licensing costs $11,000.

Citrix is introducing GoToMyPC Corporate licensing that enables end users to access their corporate PCs directly from remote computers. Customers pay up front to reserve the right to turn on extra licenses then pay an additional fee if they actually turn them on.

For instance, it costs $8,000 to reserve 200 emergency licenses, which allows customers to install the GoToMyPC clients on corporate PCs for one year. That's about $40 per seat. If they actually start using the software, they pay an additional $12 per seat per month. Citrix says this costs about a quarter of what it would cost to buy standard GoToMyPC licenses.

GoToMyPC Corporate is meant for customers that don't use GoToMyPC at all during the regular course of business but want it in reserve for emergencies. Customers that do use it during non-emergency times and want to boost the number of licenses they have active can do so online.