by
Gabe Knuth
Today, Citrix announced some changes to their Trade-Up to XenDesktop program that a lot of people already knew about due to a leak on Twitter a few weeks ago. It's official now that Citrix is making the Trade-up to XenDesktop program a permanent way to upgrade your XenApp licenses to XenDesktop.
According to Citrix, 15% of XenApp users traded up their licenses in the past year, and 50% upgraded to platinum in the process, no doubt using the perceived savings of a 2:1 trade to add the extra features. I say "perceived" not to indicate that there wasn't any savings, but because when upgrading licenses from XenApp to XenDesktop, you also switched from concurrent licensing to per user/device licensing, which puts the two for the price of one math somewhere in the cloud.
There are some changes though, and one that should please a lot of people is that you can now trade your XenApp licenses for concurrent XenDesktop licenses at a 1:1 rate instead of 2:1. Keep in mind that XenDesktop comes with XenApp, so you're essentially getting XenDesktop for the cost of the change fee (which is not insignificant, but is much cheaper than buying new licenses). Apparently this was available before, but it was not well known in the U.S. Now it has been formalized (publicized :).
Other changes include:
- Trade-up Plus - if you trade up all of your existing licenses, you'll get a 10% discount on new licenses (either CCU or User/Device)
- Trade-up Max - if you trade up your existing licenses and buy licenses for ALL of your users, you'll get a 35% discount on the new licenses instead of just 10%.
- Trade-up Restart - if your SA has expired, typically you'd have to pay a $50 reinstatement fee before trading up your licenses. Trade-up Restart essentially waives that fee while still reinstating your SA. This means (and I verified this) that you can dust off your old MetaFrame XP licenses that have expired SA and covert them to XenDesktop licenses without paying a penalty. Sorry MF 1.8 users. It'd be shell shock for you to upgrade past NT 4.0 TSE anyway :)
- XenDesktop CCU licenses have been added to the standard pricing list. This breaks down to (and this is retail, of course) $700/CCU for XenDesktop Platinum, $500/CCU for XenDesktop Enterprise, and $195/CCU for XenDesktop VDI (the version without XenApp).
- XenDesktop User/Device licenses break down as $350/UD for Platinum, $225/UD for Enterprise, and $95/UD for VDI.
With so many options, it's tough to picture what the upgrade path will look like and cost. This chart should help:
Using the chart, if you have 50 XenApp Enterprise licenses, you could trade up to XenDesktop Enterprise in User/Device mode for $6,500 ($130 x 50 users = $6500 total) or upgrade to platinum for $13,750 ($275 x 50 users = $13,750 total). The cost to buy 50 new licenses of XenDestop Enterprise or Platinum without going through Trade-up would be $11,250 and $17,500, respectively, so there is some pretty significant savings. If you want to use your numbers to come up with a price, Citrix has posted Trade-up calculator for just that purpose.
Have you taken advantage of Trade-up already (or will you now)? Why or why not?
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