Microsoft plans to introduce a single licence for its Jupiter suite of integrated e-business components that will eventually replace the existing Content Management Server 2002, Commerce Server 2002, and BizTalk Server 2002 products. The company"s e-business server lead product manager, Dave Wascha, revealed at Microsoft"s IT Forum event in Copenhagen, Denmark that licensing for the new component suite will give customers access to all components in the suite for a single, per-processor price.
He also revealed that existing users of Content Management Server, Commerce Server, and BizTalk Server with Microsoft"s Software Assurance license will be able to swap their existing licenses one-for-one with Jupiter licenses. That means that a current user of one of the three products will gain a license to the entire Jupiter component suite, and that a user that currently holds licenses for all three products will gain three licenses for the Jupiter replacement.
It"s not that simple of course, Jupiter will be licensed per-processor and the more components customers take, the more processors they are likely to use. Nevertheless, Wascha said that most customers would pay less for the component suite than they do for the comparable functionality today, and added that while customers would have the license to all components, they would be able to choose which components they wanted to deploy.