Veeam - costs question

[DPJ]

Hi,

Very quick question. I'm in a dispute with an IT services company and they claim there are 3 costs associated with Veeam backup & replication. They say there is a one off cost for the product, an annual license and a subscription for Veeam vendor support (for 3rd line support from veeam and patches etc).

Does this sound correct?

thanks

Darren

[DGrinev]

Hi Darren and welcome to the community!

You should know that we divide costs by product and support:
1. You can purchase a product\license with some period of maintenance\support included.
2. You can pay for the product support when the included period has expired. Otherwise, you can use fully functional product without a support contract.

You can find detailed information in the User Guide, also a useful info in the Licensing FAQ.
Please contact your sales representative for additional information. Thanks!

[foggy]

Initially it is always a one-off cost, you just need do decide on perpetual vs. subscription. Then you just pay for maintenance renewal. There's also a rental model for Veeam Cloud & Service Provider program members.

[Gostev]

Well, that's definitely not correct Alexander, as there's NO one-off cost and NO maintenance renewal components with subscription. Let me take another stab at explaining this in simple words, 3rd time should be the charm!

Perpetual licensing has two components, a product license component and separately a maintenance component (which includes technical support and access to updates and new versions). This licensing model is a legacy one, based on hypervisor sockets and so is NOT available for new Veeam products/functionality. However, currently we have no intentions to discontinue this model for the functionality that already supports it. Effectively, this means that only Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, and Veeam ONE for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V can be acquired with the perpetual license (which will be socket-based, and thus covering only VMs on virtualization hosts that are protected or monitored).

Your yearly payment structure will be as follows:
YEAR 1: One off product license cost (includes 1st year maintenance)
YEAR 2: Maintenance cost only
YEAR 3: Maintenance cost only
...
YEAR N: Maintenance cost only

If you stop paying maintenance, your product will continue working, but you won't be able to use it effectively for an extended time anyway due to no access to updates and new versions, which particularly add support for new OS and platform versions.

Subscription licensing has only one component, which effectively includes product license and maintenance in the single package. This is our core licensing model these days, available for all products and all functionality, and also dramatically simplified in the immediate updates.

Your yearly payment structure will be as follows:
YEAR 1: Subscription license cost
YEAR 2: Subscription license cost
YEAR 3: Subscription license cost
...
YEAR N: Subscription license cost

If you stop paying subscription, your product will stop working when your last subscription license expires.

Of course, with both perpetual and subscription, you can pre-pay multiple years too. It does not affect the payment structure, which still remains the same as above - you just don't have to worry about it for the pre-paid number of years. It does however protect you from future price increases, and in case with subscription it also provides a nice discount, so it definitely makes sense to do whenever possible.

Rental licensing that was mentioned is completely identical to subscription, but designed for (and only sold to) service providers, so there are some minor tweaks to accommodate the way we do business with service providers.

Please let me know if it is completely 100% clear, as now that I've spent time writing this up I think this should be included in FAQ too

And actually answering your original question, we have no single licensing model with 3 cost components, so that IT services company is incorrect. I suspect they may be trying to cover part of Veeam functionality with the perpetual license, and another part with the subscription license. I would certainly recommend against this approach because of associated license and contracts management complexities. Subscription is definitely the way to go these days, especially considering added portability benefits it will get in the immediate product updates, and significant discounts on multi-year subscriptions.