Cisco Tweaks UC Licensing Model

Officials at IT bellwether Cisco Systems (News - Alert) say they’ve simplified the company’s unified communications licensing model to meet customer needs better.

 

Eric Schoch, senior director of product management, told TMCnet in an interview that there are two ways to license UC software from Cisco, ala carte through the Cisco User Connect program or in bundles through the Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing, or CUWL, model – both of which are perpetual software licenses. The change mentioned above has to do with the Cisco User Connect licensing.

 

In the past, User Connect required businesses to license a server right-to-use fee that was charged on a per server basis; additionally, it entailed a device license that was device-oriented and or port-oriented. The license pricing for User Connect now has been collapsed, according to Schoch.

 

“This is an evolution of our licensing model,” he said. “We’ve gotten very clear feedback in the past…the input I received from partners as well as end users was that Workspace licensing is great. It’s per user. It makes sense. That’s how [they] think of [their] business, as per user. [But users indicated that Cisco had] a bit of an orthogonal model with [its] a la carte offering in that it’s device- and server-oriented. There are complexities there having two different models for the same products, and you can’t mix them operationally. So you can’t have a system, a cluster, that was ala carte mixed with CUWL.”

 

As a result, Cisco adjusted the User Connect model, he says.