Vendors Face Tough Licensing Choices - Page 2

Virtualization For The Customer

Microsoft and Oracle have already spoken their piece about licensing, but what do other software vendors think? Kurt Daniels, director of marketing and alliances for virtualization software maker SWSoft, has spent many hours thinking about the issue.

Daniels, who spent four years as a Microsoft product manager with a focus on licensing issues, understands how tricky the licensing issue is. He sympathizes with both the ISV trying not to lose the farm and the discerning customer who doesn't want to feel hustled.

He said a lot of customers want the best of both worlds: to pay as they go in a utility computing model and to buy the licenses and not have to buy every month for the rest of their lives.

"The other issue is, if you charge by data, or different workloads, databases, e-mail, etc., there are all these different metrics, so there is almost no way to make it not super complicated," Daniels said.

As an employee of an infrastructure software maker, he is partial to the CPU model. He believes in slight increases in the CPU pricing over time, with the ISV giving away multi-core models over time.

"No one likes counting users or devices, as we well learned with Microsoft licenses," Daniels said. "It's not really their fault, they just happen to be the biggest software company, so everyone questions them. No model will ever be perfect, but this is not a mature market. It's really 'Let's get this out there and not overcharge.'"

SWSoft, like VMware, is one of the software vendors making virtualization products that are at the eye of the licensing storm.

But unlike VMware, SWSoft's Virtuozzo software allows users to create multiple partitions on a single box with a single Linux or Windows operating system, instead of loading many different operating systems on one box. This, Daniels said, requires fewer virtualization software licenses, as well as reduced licenses for other software installed on the server.

In short, it's yet another option to help ISVs and customers meet in the precarious middle.

Overall, Daniels said he has been encouraged by the industry changes.

"There's been some good pressure put on other ISVs that are lagging behind us and Microsoft and Oracle," Daniels said. "Oracle's model might be a little complicated. It reminds me of the megahertz pricing strategy on databases a few years ago that backfired. I'm not sure that will hold up."

Analysts remain unsure, too.

"I'm not sure what the right metric is, or what will resonate the most for users," said Eastwood, whose team is conducting a survey on licensing schemes.

"That's the problem with x86, or any chip architecture for that matter. There is no good way to measure performance in terms of a MIP . They have never been able to come up with a meaningful and consistent way of measuring the throughput of the system that you can price software around."