Reeza, Licensing is an interesting topic. I had some not pretty experiences on this area and with that seen some contracts. There are 10 situations for are supplier/customer relationship, those are: - win/win This is instable equilibrum needing active maintenance. Mechanical equilibrium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - loose/loose That is a stable equilibrium. No Sales continiuation of licenses and no profits of using good toolings. The other two win/lose lose/win are temporary ones shifting to either one of the previous ones. Fraudaleus license usage and overasking prices / selling wrong products will not last for long. The scalability question and licensing is one of negotiations trust and evaluations. SAS is not clear on their cost/licenses and contracts. The only mentioned one is SAS/PC, Order SAS® Software: Order Form (renewal at : Buy SAS® Software: Frequently Asked Questions). For all others options they are referring to "contact SAS sales". This is different with other suppliers like Revolution Analytics Alterix several Hadoop suppliers, you can find a pricelist. Still you can negotiate when you are powerful enough as customer. This approach is on the bad part of SAS habits as mentioned by Gartner and others. It is the same argument as that R-discussion (no license costs, for free). Going for a SAS SAAS provision you should go for a partner program. Become a Partner | SAS. There you can find: http://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/partners/program-guide.pdf mentioning DSP and ASP. DSP's Data Service Provider and Application Service Providers are not seen as an opportunity by SAS but far more as threats. It is not being included in the MLA. By that is an obstacle for the line of cloud implementations. For license contracts being negotiated I have seen the following: - named users (mainly desktop oriented) with a total number. The higher the number as cheaper each one will get. - Solutions with a total number of users. (often 10-25).The number of machines and capacity being irrelevant. - machine capacity of the underlaying hardware of the server. This in some categories like A-Z, mostly used as based on mainframe history. The is/was extended to unix servers and gave issues as it is not equal to the virtualized logical capacity of the server it is presented to the users. = Imagine paying a 10-20 fold for license-costs of machine capacity that is not available to you. It is not only happening with SAS but with a lot of other suppliers. It is a penny-wise pound-foolish effect of the virtualization dogma on the OS and Iron level. = Processor sub-capacity licenses where the setinit gets bound to mentioned processor-id's as set by that virtualization. This is strange for a multi-tier environment hyper-threading at processors, needing DR plans to be tested/evaluated. In US there is a third party that is handling all US government deals. Executive Information Systems, LLC. Those price of the contracts are visible.
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