I can only speak in general terms about North American pricing; there is a separate price list for EMEA which I haven't seen. But here, the Named User and Registered Client models are considerably cheaper per user than Concurrent User, per user; roughly 30%. You do have to bear in mind though that they have different definitions of what a user is, and they have different user-counting methodologies.
There are other differences between the models as well. As RHD indicated, Named User and Registered Client are multi-server license models, whereas Concurrent User is a single-server model. So the former can be installed on multiple servers (same platform of course), including DR, and the latter must be licensed separately for each box, with DR-specific licenses available for a 50% discount on licensing and maintenance.
You can't necessarily always "switch" licenses freely (free as in easy or free as in beer), but provided you are paid up on maintenance you certainly can trade in a license on one model for an equivalent license on another model. If the trade-in value of the current license (shown on your Media Status report) equals or exceeds the license cost of the new license, it's free. (If it's more, PSC doesn't write you a cheque for the difference
) If it's less, you just pay the difference. So when I move a client from Concurrent User to Named User, it is usually inexpensive and often free; I've done this several times. But of course it does depend on your mix of client and your user counts.
Say you have a customer with 150 defined application users (i.e. people and processes), a high water mark of 100 concurrent remote users (Win32), 10 server-side batch clients (AIX), and a compiler on each platform, all Concurrent User. Two boxes, Prod and UAT. They might have a set of licenses like this:
Code:
Prod
Client Networking Win32 100 UBP
Enterprise RDBMS AIX64 102 UBP
4GL Dev System Win32 1 UBP
4GL Dev System AIX64 1 UBP
UAT
Client Networking Win32 20 UBP
Enterprise RDBMS AIX64 22 UBP
4GL Dev System Win32 1 UBP
4GL Dev System AIX64 1 UBP
Note no licenses for the batch users. In Concurrent, you don't count them if they are outnumbered by the remote users. You just count whichever set of clients has the greater number. And you don't license all 150 users as they don't all log in at the same time.
Under Named User, the requirements might look like this:
Code:
Prod/UAT
Client Networking Win32 150 NBP
Client Networking AIX64 10 NBP
Enterprise RDBMS AIX64 162 NBP
4GL Dev System Win32 1 NBP
4GL Dev System AIX64 1 NBP
"UBP" = Concurrent User model; "NBP" = Named User model. Note that model is per-license, not for all of your licenses as a whole.
In the Named User case, because of the different definition of what a "user" is, you must separately license the server-side clients. And you must license all 150 people, no matter how often they log in.
But if you were moving a client from Concurrent to Named pricing, you could trade in your 100-user Client Networking and your 20-user Client Networking licenses and apply the trade-in value of them toward the purchase of the 15o-user NBP Client Networking license. Same goes for other products. Obviously the server-side Client Networking license is net new so you'd pay full price for that. So in a case like this it is pretty much close to a wash for the license cost. But the kicker is that the seats are cheaper: that means that annual maintenance, which is a fixed percentage of license cost, is cheaper every year from now on. So even if you had to pay some money up front for the trade-in, the switch pays for itself down the road due to lower maintenance costs.
I mentioned that the model applies individually to each license because they may not all be the same. Yes, you do have to match clients and servers. For example if you just had one server license and one client license, you wouldn't have the server license (e.g. Enterprise RDBMS) on Concurrent User while the clients (e.g. Client Networking) that connect to it are on Named User. Both would be on the same model. But you can have a mix of models in one system.
Example: take the Named User system above but add a WebSpeed web application component to the mix. So you have end users out on the internet (classified as "Unknown Users") connecting to this application through a web portal (in addition to the other users mentioned above). WebSpeed is no longer sold as a separate product with that name. From a licensing perspective it is the same as AppServer. AppServer is available under three models: Named User, Registered Client, and Access Agent (and a fourth, Concurrent User, if you're grandfathered because you had it with a v9 license originally). Named User or Registered Client models are for use with Standard Users or Occasional Users, but not Unknown Users. Access Agents are for use with Unknown Users, but not the other two user types. So in this case you would buy client-side and server-side Access Agent (AAP) licenses for AppServer. So assuming you want to install the AppServer server-side, your requirements might now look like this:
Code:
Prod/UAT
Client Networking Win32 150 NBP
Client Networking AIX64 10 NBP
Enterprise RDBMS AIX64 162 NBP
4GL Dev System Win32 1 NBP
4GL Dev System AIX64 1 NBP
Enterprise AppServer AIX64 5 AAP
Enterprise RDBMS AIX64 5 AAP
A few things to note:
- It is no longer the case that all of your licenses are on the same model.
- You now have two database licenses, even though you have one database. You only install one on the server, say, the 150-user license. The second one is sometimes called a paper license. You need it for compliance, but it's never installed anywhere (at least until PSC's installer gets more sophisticated; don't hold your breath).
- AppServer is a product that has a user-count minimum; for Enterprise it is 5.
- In this context, AppServer is a client license. Each WebSpeed agent is a database client.
- If you buy 5 Access Agents on the client side (AppServer), you buy 5 Access Agents on the server side (RDBMS).
- You don't have to do something silly like match the AppServer user count to the Client Networking user count (I've heard from people who have been told that), or license every user of the web portal (there could be hundreds or thousands; think web banking for example). The Access Agent is intrinsically a many-to-one model, which is why it is much more expensive per seat than Named or Registered. But specifically when used under the Access Agent model, you count the AppServer/WebSpeed agents, not the people who connect through them. There are other cases where you may license AppServers under the Named User model, in which case they are the same price per seat as Client Networking, and similar rules apply. AppServer can be used in a lot of different ways so unfortunately there is no simple, straightforward "here's how you license AppServer" rule you can always apply (much to the chagrin of some people I won't mention...).
Also note: the above represents my best understanding of how licensing works, today, in my region. YMMV. But I can be wrong and the above can change over time.
Educate yourself. Get a copy of the price list. Get a copy of the OpenEdge licensing guide; the latest one came out in December 2013. It describes license attributes, like models, types, platforms, user definitions, counting methodologies, etc. Get it and read it before you talk to Progress about purchases or trade-ins. And when you do talk to them and they provide licensing requirement opinions,
get them in writing. Good luck.