ZEN and the art of Novell pricing
 
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About a month ago I took Novell to task for their pricing policy on ZENWorks for Servers. Since then, Novell has now announced a different model. It still sounded confusing, so I went to Novell marketing maven Jason Werner for clarification.
The latest announcement prices ZEN for Servers at $75 per user or $5,000 per server, with a special promotion price of $40 per user through the end of March. That still sounded like a pretty steep price to me.
Werner explained, though, that the per-user licensing doesn't mean you have to match the user count on each server. You only need to license the number of unique users accessing resources on that server. That's a fairly big distinction, as the following example shows.
Let's say you have five servers, each running a 250-user license of NetWare. Let's also say you have a total of 300 users who access the various servers from time to time. Licensing at $5,000 per server would cost you $25,000. Matching the license count of each server would set you back $93,750 (250 users x 5 servers x $75). But only having to license 300 users (while installing ZEN for Servers on all five servers) would only be $22,500. That's a considerable difference.
It's Novell's intention to eventually bundle all of the ZENWorks products (currently, ZENWorks for Desktops and ZENWorks for Networks, in addition to ZENWorks for Servers) where a single pricing model would apply. Since ZEN for Desktops and ZEN for Networks interact directly with users, a user-based licensing scheme seems the best way to price the bundle, thus necessitating that same model for ZEN for Servers.
ZEN for Servers 1.0 will only work with NetWare servers Version 4.11 and higher, but later editions should work with all eDirectory-supported platforms (such as, Windows 2000, Solaris and Linux).
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Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. His most recent book is "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks" published by SAMS. Dave's company, Virtual Quill, provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more at Virtual Quill or by e-mail at info@vquill.com
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Past newsletters.
Network World, 02/21/00.
Novell Delivers ZENworks for Servers
Newsletter: Novell expands scope of system management with ZENworks 2Network World Fusion Focus, 07/21/99.
Novell to make bigger QoS, policy mgmt. push
Network World, 02/07/00.
