AppServer help with pricing model

L

LarryD

Active Member
One of our customers is going to be integrating with a 3rd party web app that uses ADO .Net . Connections will be to an 10.2B AppServer and state-free/stateless.

This is our first use of AppServer, and one of the confusions between talking to Progress tech support and the Progress sales rep is which pricing model we should use, concurrent users or agents. Tech support said concurrent users, sales rep said agents. The price difference could be considerable since we are unsure of the volume of requests the AppServer will be getting. Each request should be small (single part number, etc), with only one process (convert cart to sales order) doing any db writes, so the numbers could be high but each individual one very quick. Initially during "heavy" loads we expect the volume to be potentially in the 50+ give or take per minute, but this could be scaled up in the near future. What the actual numbers will ultimately be is anyone's guess as we expand from B2B to B2C.

Does anyone have any suggestions/comments/gotcha's on whether we should be going with concurrent users or agents in this type of environment?

Any and all comments welcome.
 
The concurrent user model was the licensing model of V9 and, AFAIK, is only offered customers to be carried over to OpenEdge 10.

The OpenEdge licensing models are:

  • Registered client: That means you pay a license seat per device that is accessing your application. This gives you the freedom of having an unlimited number of human users accessing the application with a limited number of devices.
  • Named user: That means you pay a license seat per human user that is accessing your application. This gives you the freedom of having a limited number of human users accessing the application with an unlimited number of devices.
Both models give you the freedom to have your sever side installation (database, AppServer) spread across as many machines as you want to whereas in the concurrent user model you have to pay licenses for each machine ...

But, I doubt that too many Progress sales reps understand their own licensing model and most likely they will urge you to license the model which will given them the most revenue and you are are just a stepping stone on their way to ProClub ...

Regards, RealHeavyDude.
 
Absence of a Progress version makes it difficult to respond clearly. As RHD notes, the model has changed between 9 and 10 quite significantly. To supplement what he says, I will note that OE10 also has "Access Agent" pricing. This is typically used for users which do not log into the application and which use the application less than two hours a week, i.e., the classic casual web access.
 
Customer is going from 10.0B to 10.2B for the DB server and AppServer, both Enterprise versions. The OE licensing for the database we understand and can deal with.

They currently do not have AppServer, so this is a new addtion and we have to choose between the various pricing models for AppServer. Concurrent user pricing is $110 per and the Agent Access is $750 per, both with a minimum of 5.

What I'm trying to figure out is what the agents buy us vs. the concurrent user model given that we are going state-free with small db query requests (no db writes with one exception) from the .Net app, and which of these pricing models will be the most cost efficient yet give us the performance that web apps need.

Thanks for the input.
 
AFAIK, Progress won't let you choose a different licensing model for the AppServer than you already have in place for the database when it comes to concurrent user, registered client or named user. The "access agent" pricing is new to me so I can't tell you about that.

Regards, RealHeavyDude.
 
Customer is on per CPU pricing for the database. Whether that remains or we will need to change this for other reasons is undecided at this point.

Progress sales rep gave me the impression the AppServer license was up to us to choose.... ah well. If it truly is a choice, my reason for posting as I stated above was to see if anyone could give some insight into the licensing options available and what they really buy you in the real world.

Once again, thanks for the input.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top