Cognos 11 Licensing

[juetron]

Obviously, the licensing of Capabiilties has been significantly simplifed. Does IBMs efforts to simplify the licensing structure for Cognos 11 also extend to Non-Production environment licensing?

Regarding the license statement:
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/sla/sladb.nsf/lilookup/43DBFB0C2D60D498852580E6000BC372?OpenDocument

There is a section that states:
"Non-Production Limitation
If the Program is designated as "Non-Production", the Program can only be deployed as part of the Licensee's internal development and test environment for internal non-production activities, including but not limited to testing, performance tuning, fault diagnosis, internal benchmarking, staging, quality assurance activity and/or developing internally used additions or extensions to the Program using published application programming interfaces. Licensee is not authorized to use any part of the Program for any other purposes without acquiring the appropriate production entitlements."

Does this mean you no longer have to license your Development and Test environments with a specific "non-production" license - assuming they are only used for the purposes in the statement ?

[MFGF]

Obviously, the licensing of Capabiilties has been significantly simplifed. Does IBMs efforts to simplify the licensing structure for Cognos 11 also extend to Non-Production environment licensing?

Regarding the license statement:
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/sla/sladb.nsf/lilookup/43DBFB0C2D60D498852580E6000BC372?OpenDocument

There is a section that states:
"Non-Production Limitation
If the Program is designated as "Non-Production", the Program can only be deployed as part of the Licensee's internal development and test environment for internal non-production activities, including but not limited to testing, performance tuning, fault diagnosis, internal benchmarking, staging, quality assurance activity and/or developing internally used additions or extensions to the Program using published application programming interfaces. Licensee is not authorized to use any part of the Program for any other purposes without acquiring the appropriate production entitlements."

Does this mean you no longer have to license your Development and Test environments with a specific "non-production" license - assuming they are only used for the purposes in the statement ?

Hi,

For Cognos Analytics, if you are using the named-user licensing model, your users are licensed use Cognos Analytics, regardless of whether you have designated an instance as production or non-production. They are just named users, and the usage of the product is irrelevant.

If you are using the pvu licensing model, you are licensing Cognos based on the CPU power of the server or servers it is installed on. In this instance, there are specific licenses for a production install and a non-production install. The license document states (in your quoted section above) that you can't use a non-production licensed install for production purposes.

As always, I'll caveat my response with the usual "check with your IBM account manager for confirmation" :)

Cheers!

MF.

[juetron]

What we have essentially is 4 sets of licenses:

1) An Analytics User PVU license which allows our user base to run reports and use some of the higher capabilities (QS, AS, Workspace etc). Not that we let everyone use the higher capabilities of course.

2) Analytics User Named Licenses. These are assigned to users on a needs must basis so they can UAT reports in Dev and Test environments.

3) Named Analytics Explorer - Advanced developers.

4) Named Admin licenses (enough for Prod, Dev and Test).

If you no longer need to license the 'Non-Production' environments then we would no longer need the Analytics User Named Licenses. This would save some significant cost as we are about to renew.

The trouble is that our asset management team have the relationship with IBM Account Manager. But they do not fully understand the complexities of the Cognos licensing model. So it is a bit like chinese whispers.

[MFGF]

What we have essentially is 4 sets of licenses:

1) An Analytics User PVU license which allows our user base to run reports and use some of the higher capabilities (QS, AS, Workspace etc). Not that we let everyone use the higher capabilities of course.

2) Analytics User Named Licenses. These are assigned to users on a needs must basis so they can UAT reports in Dev and Test environments.

3) Named Analytics Explorer - Advanced developers.

4) Named Admin licenses (enough for Prod, Dev and Test).

If you no longer need to license the 'Non-Production' environments then we would no longer need the Analytics User Named Licenses. This would save some significant cost as we are about to renew.

The trouble is that our asset management team have the relationship with IBM Account Manager. But they do not fully understand the complexities of the Cognos licensing model. So it is a bit like chinese whispers.

Hi,

You haven't specified whether your Analytics User PVU license is for a production instance or a non-production instance. I'm assuming production?

Your Analytics User "Named User" licenses allow these named users to use any of your instances of Cognos - including Dev, Test and Production (although the PVU license you have covers Production anyway.) If you remove these Analytics User "Named User" licenses from your license pool, and you don't have a non-production PVU license covering the server(s) Dev and Test are installed on, you are effectively taking away the ability for Analytics User access to anything apart from your PVU licensed production instance.

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea from that you no longer need to license Non-Production environments? If you're using the PVU model, you need to have PVU non-prod licenses for Dev and Test. If you're using the Named User model, your users are covered for all instances. You're currently using a mixed model, but you appear to have only one PVU license covering Production? This means you need your named user licenses for non-production access (Dev and Test).

I'm intrigued about your multiple Admin licenses though. Is this because you have multiple named users acting as Administrators? If it's just one person, you only need one license, and it covers him/her for all your Cognos instances.

I'd honestly recommend you find out who your IBM account manager is and reach out to him/her to discuss this.

Cheers!

MF.

[juetron]

That all makes perfect sense. Thanks for taking the time to reply !

1) Production Analytics User PVU license for access to Production.
2) Analytics User Named Licenses for all instances. However, Prod covered as above.
3) Named Analytics Explorer for all instances.
4) Named Admin licenses for all instances.

I'll check in with our IBM contact to confirm. Thanks again !

[MFGF]

That all makes perfect sense. Thanks for taking the time to reply !

1) Production Analytics User PVU license for access to Production.
2) Analytics User Named Licenses for all instances. However, Prod covered as above.
3) Named Analytics Explorer for all instances.
4) Named Admin licenses for all instances.

I'll check in with our IBM contact to confirm. Thanks again !

That seems perfect, according to my understanding. Hoping you have a productive discussion with MR :)

Cheers!

MF.