Kemp has introduced a new TCO calculator that shows customers the difference in costs between metered, perpetual, and competitive licensing options, and is emphasizing its use as an educational tool that shows more than cost savings, illustrating how the alternatives apply in different kinds of scenarios, and whether consumption-based licensing is a good fit for a specific customer.

New York City-based Kemp has announced the availability of a TCO [Total Cost of Ownership] calculator to assess customer ADC [application delivery controller] and load balancing deployments. Kemp has been making a strong push recently to encourage customers to change to a consumption-based usage model and a primary function of this tool is to show customers if this makes sense for them given their specific situation and desired use case.

“We believe that we are at the precipice of the next generation of application delivery, in which we have seen a transition from load balancers to ADC and now to multi-cloud application experience,” said Jason Dover, Kemp’s VP of Product Strategy. “Our new releases will be connected to that. Many customers have stumbled onto the concept of multi-cloud, from a natural perspective of events, such as through an acquisition. We see consumption-based metered licensing as a great fit for this.”

Dover said that while Kemp has had consumption-based pricing for a while, last year is when they really productized it.

“We have had it for two years in some iteration,” he indicated. “Since we introduced it, we learned from our customers and learned from our partners, and added more capability and flexibility. Customers use it for DevOps, for just-in-time deployment of services, and for flexibility. Consumption-based pricing gives customers the ability to provision not for what they might need, but for what they actually use. We think the market for this is now.”

The problem, Dover said. is that some organizations still aren’t fully prepared to adopt it.

“We find that many customers are initially eager, but once they get further into the process, they determine that while IT wants it, other parts of the business aren’t ready for it yet,” Dover indicated. “They want a way that’s consistent with a cloud licensing model, but the challenge is that their operations and finance teams aren’t ready. So they want flexible contracts, which give them a path to transition to this model when they are ready, but they often see as more likely in the next 18 to 24 months.”

The TCO calculator is designed to provide organizations with visibility into the costs around application delivery, so that they can see what metered licensing would cost them, and determine whether it would be a good fit in a customer’s specific environment. This type of tool is valued in many areas of IT as a sales tool, to show a prospect how a different product or purchasing method can save them money. Dover said that while this is a consideration here, it’s not the most important one.

“We didn’t want it to focus on just that it can save X percentage of costs,” he stated. “There’s much more to it than that. The pricing and the savings you get is a factor, but it’s not our lead here.”

The Kemp TCO calculator compares three things: traditional perpetual licensing costs, metered licensing costs, and competitive load balancing/ADC licensing costs, particularly F5. It also lets users can assess the number and capacity range of load balancers needed to support their application infrastructure.

“Those three things are the common questions that we get, so we consolidated them all into the TCO calculator,” Dover noted. “The calculator lets the customer focus on the use cases and the outcomes, to determine the best fit for their situation. If, for all example, all they need is 6 to 10 load balancers, it will show that metered licensing likely isn’t the best fit for them. The calculator helps the customer see where the metered license is a good fit, and where it isn’t.”

While the TCO calculator can and will be used as a sales tool, Dover said that it’s more accurate to look on it as an educational tool.

“It’s like a mini-White Paper that gives customers insight on things on such as what a peak use scenario means from an application delivery perspective,” he indicated. “It allows us to directly educate our customers and put it in hands of partners to enable them to educate them. People need to be educated. The potential savings is the cherry on top.”

The TCO calculator can be viewed at https://kemptechnologies.com/total-cost-ownership/calculator.