Unanticipated demand is one of IT’s nastier problems. We don’t like it when we hear that we are going to have to deploy 100 more servers in 3 months to support growth of an existing system to support a new business initiative, but when 3 months becomes 24 hrs, miracles are required.
Regardless of cause, the business expectation is always that somehow IT will deliver service. Those of us working in the application delivery space are often better equipped than most to react to this type of change, we only need to bring two things to the table and we can deliver extra capacity in a matter of hours. We always have server capacity available, either in the form of DR capacity, hot spares for high availability, over-capacity because we choose not to run servers at the red line, or our engineering and pre-production systems. Some servers may have to be reimaged, moved to a different farm, some applications deployed, but that is about it. Delivering server capacity ahead of demand even in these most difficult situations is exciting, but usually no more than that.
The trouble is where to you get the s/w licenses from? When it’s 5 o’clock on Friday afternoon, how are you going to place an order for new licenses in your procurement system, get the order approved, submitted to the vendor, processed and released so the license key is in your hands and deployed onto your systems by Monday morning? You can’t. Not unless you have a Service Provider License Agreement, and you can only get one of those if you are a real service provider, calling yourself an internal service provider delivering service to your own business isn’t going to work. Something else is needed.
There are several models that could be adopted to address the problem of unanticipated demand; the implementation of a SaaS model for product licensing being only one of them. If instead of having to deploy your own internal license delivery infrastructure, why couldn’t you connect to a (cloud hosted) service managed by your product vendor that managed and monitored license delivery and billed you either as a monthly service or as a perpetual license? Whatever, the detail of the implemementation may not matter that much, the capability is what matters. So with that in mind I’d like to ask for comments on the topic and I'll create a simple poll in the right margin to gauge interest.
One of the more interesting thing about such a proposal is that it might enable customers to reduce the excess licensing capacity they have to carry, resulting in a significant capital saving, this could be especially advantageous during initial stages of a long roll-out.
I’ve been talking to Citrix about the need to provide solutions to problems around unanticipated demand for some time and while some interest has been expressed, there has been no visible action yet. Maybe if Citrix are making a commitment to offer service providers a better licensing mechanism, we won't be far behind.