On July 1, Citrix announced that as of Oct. 1, 2020, they will no longer be selling perpetual licensing for on-premises deployments of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD), in favor of on-premises subscription-based licensing. There will be no impact to your existing on-premises perpetual licenses you own today. This licensing change means you will be able to add more users but you will need to buy on-premises subscription licenses on a yearly (or multi-year) basis. The new on-premises subscription-based licensing is using the same concept for subscription licensing as the Citrix Business Continuity Assurance (BCA) licensing Citrix had as a response to COVID-19.it
Note: If you purchased any Citrix Business Continuity Assurance (BCA) licensing between March through June 2020 as your response to COVID-19/”Work From Home” initiatives, you should start planning now on how you will handle the expiration of the Citrix BCA Licensing in 2021 by contacting your Entisys360 Account Executive as soon as possible.
The perpetual licensing model was the original licensing model since the inception of the company and still the most common purchasing option, but there many benefits of migrating to subscription licensing:
- Lower Upfront Costs. Subscriptions allow you to make short term investments to address pressing business challenges and flexibility to increase/decrease usage yearly.
- Predictable Costs. Costs will change as your usage changes allowing for a predictable cost that remains relatively consistent year after year.
- Great timing to look migrating to Citrix Workspace on Citrix Cloud. With the increase of “Work from Home” initiatives, desire to lower administrative costs and increase user productivity, this is the right time to start looking at the benefits of Citrix Workspace on Citrix Cloud.
And just because perpetual licensing is going away, there is no need to fret. Here are the facts:
- Clients can still purchase perpetual user licenses through Sept. 30, 2020. You will pay renewals as usual on the anniversary date of the license purchase.
- Clients can purchase perpetual user licenses ahead of needing them if you think you will need additional licenses after Sept. 30, 2020 and you prefer to have perpetual licenses (CAPEX).
- Clients on supported CVAD versions will not have to make any changes to add subscription licenses alongside of perpetual licenses.
- No changes to the license server version (if you on a supported version).
- No changes to the Delivery Group licensing options (if you purchase the same product – Virtual App, Virtual Desktop or Virtual Apps and Desktop – and edition – Standard, Advanced, or Premium – as your original licensing purchase).
- Clients can start to look at trading up to Citrix Cloud (control plane as a service delivered via the cloud) while still leveraging on-premises workloads (or if you prefer hybrid multi-cloud based workloads).
Here is a matrix that can help you make some decisions if you have to purchase additional licenses any time soon.
Use the first two columns to decide what is your current state. That will then determine your options via the third column.
