Those who know me may recall that I started life as a maths teacher, so a chance to dabble in a bit of algebra is always a treat. And for those of you who hate algebra and could never see a use for it – well, here it is – a way of working out the price changes in SCE (the new EA Server and Cloud Enrolment) and EAP (the old Enterprise Application Platform Enrolment).
We know that in the EAP, licences are split into either Standard or Enterprise flavours and customers get either 15% or 40% discount off the price of a new licence and no discount off the compulsory three year’s SA. So, for a SQL Standard licence costing “S” the price paid over 3 years is 0.85 x S + 3 x SA. Since SA is 25% of the licence price, it’s 0.85 x S + 3 x 0.25 x S = 1.6 x S. In other words, if you know the list price of a SQL Standard licence, the customer actually pays 1.6 times that through the lifetime of the EAP.
Good. Let’s do the same with a SQL Enterprise licence. Using a similar approach with “E” being an Enterprise licence, the price paid over 3 years is 0.6 x E + 3 x SA or 0.6 x E + 3 x 0.25 x E = 1.35 x E. So the customer pays 1.35 times the price of an Enterprise licence through the EAP.
And what about SCE? Well, there’s no differentiation between Standard and Enterprise licences (good) and there’s a 15% discount off the TOTAL L&SA price (interesting). Again taking a SQL Standard edition licence costing “S” we can work out that the customer pays 0.85 x S + 0.85 x 3 x SA or 0.85 x S + 0.85 x 3 x 0.25 x S which (finally) comes to 1.4875 x S. Luckily, since the calculations are the same for the Enterprise edition, we’re done!
And the conclusions? Well, for a SQL Standard licence, the customer pays 1.6 times the licence in an EAP and 1.4875 times the licence in SCE. Dividing 1.4875 by 1.6 gives 0.9296 which tells me that it’s a 7% decrease in price for the total L&SA price over the life of the SCE. For SQL Enterprise, it’s 1.4875 divided by 1.35 which gives 1.101 which represents a 10% increase. So, not huge changes in price for a customer.
So don’t you wish you’d paid attention in your maths lessons? 😉