How do you co-term licenses?

[motofrappe]

Case # 04742524

We have additional 365 users so I need to up the Veeam license subscription. The website clearly states:

Adding Office 365 licenses and renewals:
When you add Office 365 users, you’ll have the flexibility to add additional Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 licenses, and co-term your different license purchases to match-up on the same subscription cycle, keeping subscription expiration dates and renewals simple and straightforward.

There is no such option in the portal. I ran into this already once before, and Veeam support's solution was for us to renew the EXISTING licenses for an additional yearin order to make it work. We were just two months in on our current subscription, so yea no thanks. I ended up starting a second subscription just to get the product to work so I ended up with two separate license subscriptions with two expiration dates bundled together.

Now I need to increase licenses again, and this is becoming a huge headache. Anyone know how to increase licenses and co-term them to the existing ones?

[HannesK]

Hello,
I'm not sure which portal you mean, but Veeam licenses are available via Veeam partners / resellers. They can make offers with co-termed licenses.

https://www.veeam.com/backup-microsoft- ... icing.html -> contact sales or find a reseller https://www.veeam.com/buy-veeam-product ... a_reseller

Anyway: support should also be able to help you.

Best regards,
Hannes

PS: the forums are run by R&D, so licensing is out of scope here

[nielsengelen]

Please work with support here to assist you in merging your licenses and they will be able to clarify how you can extend it with the new users.

[motofrappe]

Thank you for the replies.

I was referring to the my.veeam portal where licensing is managed.

I've worked with the reseller and they can only do a full year license or more, and it is a separate subscription. They have no clue about co-terming Veeam licenses, and see no options for it.

I tried reaching out to multiple support personnel, and here are some of their responses:

If you need additional users for you VBO365 license you can purchase a separate license and merge it with your current license.
In this manner you can use it with your existing license.

-that is what I am doing now, and juggling different contracts and expiration dates.

...Sales is specifying that they could provide a minimum user amount of 10, and that a co-term would come along with a renewal of the first license.

- again, have to deal with multiple contracts and expiration dates until 1st contract expires.

A full year is required upon new licensing. ... This would be possible if the current contract was further than a year from expiration... , an additional license for 10 months is not possible.

We can work next year to co-term everything but in order to add users, a full year is needed to be purchased and the licenses can be merged for usage.
We can then renew each contract for a year and also push the original contract an additional 3 months

- Again, co-terming is apparently not possible until the second year.

Yes you can certainly do this. Just to make you aware the current licenses expire 9/2021 so in order to co term the new licenses would then expire 9/2022.

I am looping in @XXX who can renew the current licenses for 1 year and then add the additional 10 licenses on to that to make a total of XX licenses expiring 9/22.

- nowhere does Veeam state in their documentation that my subscription has to be longer than a year in order to co-term licenses.

In short, support is not aligned on the matter, with the exception that they all contradict what the Veeam website states.

Thanks for your time, and confirming I am not missing anything. Unfortunately, there is no "general" forum I could find to post this.

[HannesK]

Hello,
the reason that co-term doesn't work for you is written on the same page you quoted for the co-term sentence.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is available in 1 to 5-year annual subscriptions. 

https://www.veeam.com/backup-microsoft- ... icing.html

I asked one of my sales colleagues and he has customers that have three and more different dates without co-terming anything and it works fine for them. Agree, looks a little bit ugly, but technically there seems no issue according to my colleague.

But you bring up a good point. I will check whether we can make it clearer in the "Adding Office 365 licenses and renewals" section.

Best regards and sorry for the confusion,
Hannes

[motofrappe]

Hannes, thank you for confirming this with your colleagues. We already have an active 1-year subscription so we meet that requirement. I agree that the software will work without issues if you have multiple active subscriptions. However, managing multiple subscriptions multiplies the amount of overhead involved in quoting, approving, purchasing and managing this one single product. There is also the risk of missing one of many expiration/renewal dates, resulting in halted backups and potential data loss.

The real problem here is that Veeam is effectively forcing existing customers into entering new contracts and annual subscriptions, while their language conveys a very different practice, one that the other SAAS vendors out there follow - simply, co-terming licenses to whatever subscription is already in place.

The forced contracts accompanied by tons of additional overhead and risk, and then wrapped up in the misleading language really seals my perception of Veeam. If you can pass anything to the higher ups, that would be it.

Thanks for taking the time to address this question, hope you have a good week.

[JRRW]

We ran into this as well... It seems like our only option for this is to either

1. Buy extra each time to only do 2-3 a year
   --This though still would require either having two renewal periods, or renewing the 'old' licensing for an additional period of time vs just doing <1 year on the new licensing
2. Spend >$100,000 and get an Enterprise Agreement

Plus it's a PITA to add licenses as you have to go through your VAR/Reseller each time. The problem is that they sell via reseller/VARs who get a cut/discount - so we can't direct bill to Veeam like we can with Microsoft.

Veeam really should invest in a Microsoft approach to SAAS license management and allow us to ad-hoc increase/decrease the counts with something like a min qty.
i.e.:

• Initial purchase of annual licensing for 1,000 VBO licenses billed annual
• --Additional licenses during that period get the same per month rate but are discounted by remaining months
• --Removal of licensing can be done 2 times a year perhaps
• If going through a VAR, setup VAR within their CRM/ERP to automatically generate the request/billing

The tricky part is the last point though -figuring out how to do he VAR/Reseller integrations.

[motofrappe]

Yes, plenty of ways to make this process simple for all parties involved. Other vendors have no problem doing it, even with resellers involved. At the end of the day, though, it's in Veeam's interest to keep locking you in for additional years.

In the short few months we've used them, I've had to use their technical support twice. The "support" consisted of them sending me documentation to read through and attempt to fix the issues myself. I guess my experience with paid support has been much better with other vendors because I sure expected more. And now with this licensing fiasco, it was an easy decision to get away from Veeam and take the loss for the existing licenses.

[HannesK]

Hello,
it's sad to hear, that you moved away. There is always room for improvement and your feedback is valuable to us.

Veeam uses a 100% partner model / ecosystem. Doing SaaS would damage our partner-ecosystem. So there are no plans for SaaS. Sure, there are always pros and cons of direct business vs. partner-business. I agree on that.

Best regards,
Hannes

[jandrewartha]

So the "flexibility" of adding additional licenses and co-terming them with existing licenses is only possible if you keep your existing licenses with more than a year of support active at all times? The page could definitely use some clarification in that regard.