LICENSING POLICY FOR ASP

Dear Brian,
I read your article in the Network Magazine September 2002 issue on Software Licensing Policy. The story gives a fair idea on different licensing policies adopted by many organizations. I request you to throw some light on the licensing policy adopted by ASP vendors. There are many applications (e.g. MySap) running on the ASP model. It would be really great if I can have some information in this regard.

Regards
Hemant K Agrawal
Project Manager
Stingray Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Dear Hemant Agrawal,
I had forwarded your query to Sagar Sule, VP-Technical & Operations, Cyquator Technologies Ltd. Here is his reply.

Typically, an ASP Licensing Program enables selected ASPs to license products on a monthly subscription basis. The Program is usually designed to map how ASPs do business—by providing services on a monthly fee to its end-customers.

Here, the ASPs provide the licenses to the end-customers while adhering to certain mandatory pre-requisites chalked out by the specific product vendor. If an end-customer acquires its own licenses and outsources the management of this software to an ASP, then the end-customer retains the licenses to its software if its relationship with the ASP terminates. If the ASP acquires the licenses through an ASP Licensing Program, the ASP is the primary licensee of the software, which in turn is sub-licensed to the end-customer for a specific contracted time span.

Generally, products in an ASP Licensing Program can be licensed either in Per Subscriber mode or Per CPU mode. In Per Subscriber mode, a Subscriber Access License is needed for each subscriber who is authorized to utilize the software within the contracted time period. In Per CPU mode, an unlimited number of subscribers can utilize the software being run using a single CPU for each CPU license."

I have given the above details keeping in mind our ASP relationship with Microsoft; as far as mySAP is concerned, this may not exactly fit in but all the same, it should not be much different.

Regards
Sagar Sule
VP-Technical & Operations, Cyquator Technologies Ltd

SAP & ESCAN

Dear Soutiman,
I would like to ask you if you have any information about conflicts between SAP R/3 and eScan, when both run together on the same machine?

Regards
João Paulo Crujo

Dear João Paolo Crujo,
Thank you for writing to me. A company that runs SAP R/3 is usually large or medium-sized. These companies typically dedicate separate servers for running R/3 modules. I have not come across a company in India that runs both ERP modules and security solutions on the same box. However, a company can run the two applications on the same box and a good way to do it is to create separate partitions for the two applications.

The problems that may arise are:

1. The security solution may use up too much resources like processor cycles and leave less for the ERP applications.
2. Security solutions usually need frequent updates and upgrades. This may interfere with the functioning of the ERP modules.

Running the security solution on a low-end NT server can help.

I hope I have answered your query sufficiently.

Regards
Soutiman Das Gupta