Credit: eyeretina – stock.adobe.com
As of June 8th, all Citrix on-premises Citrix solutions are being offered in a subscription model. A blog post was made letting customers know of this availability. This pricing model was initially created to give the customers who are not prepared to move to Citrix Cloud services the ability to purchase subscription based instead of perpetual licensing as they were used to. Subscription based licensing has been the model most software vendors have been moving towards for a while now, and with the advent of Cloud products and “everything as a service”, this move to subscription-based licensing has only gained momentum.
Citrix has now modified their licensing page to show that Perpetual Licensing will no longer be available for purchase after 9-30-2020. What does this mean to those customers who are currently Perpetual based licensing? What does it mean to customers who need to renew their support? How will perpetual licensed customers be able to add licensing or other products after that time? Will I be forced to “Trade-Up”?
Hopefully, we can answer these questions here without any major heartache
First, from now until September 30th, nothing really changes. If you buy your licenses perpetually and wish to continue doing so, you might want to make a purchase before then. After September 30th, you will no longer be able to purchase Perpetual Licenses. If you are current on Customer Success Services (CSS), you can continue renewing as long as you want at the rate you are now.
So, what changes? Starting on the first of October, if you want to add additional licensing, you can only purchase these as a subscription-based license. You can use the same license server, allocate your licenses the same way you are today, and the license server will continue to hand them out as they are needed. You do not need to go back and change any of your perpetual licenses to subscription at all. If a license is needed, and all the perpetual licenses are handed out, it will start handing out licenses from the pool of subscription licenses. No muss, no fuss.
If you are in the process of buying new licenses or additional licenses, then you might want to consider whether you should purchase the subscription version or the perpetual version. If you have a budgeted purchase in place, and are not planning to buy until after 1 October, you will need to reach out to your reseller to get the updated pricing for that purchase, as you will not be able to get the perpetual licenses you likely budgeted for. You can also feel free to reach out to myself or your Citrix representative with any other questions you may have
And lastly, if you are a networking customer, nothing is changing Networking devices still use the same licensing structure they have been using.
Your best bet is to reach out to your reseller representative and they can help you with a comparison of the costs between the Subscription licenses and perpetual. And, you can feel free to reach out to me with any questions as well.