Microsoft offers 2 types of CAL’s (Client access licenses), User CAL’s and Device CAL’s, both options are priced identically but have different user rights. As most companies order Device CAL’s (this is the default when you order a CAL from you reseller), as a result potential substantial savings are lost.
The first step is to understand what you need and the second is to determine the quantity needed. Take a look at the examples below in order to better understand how to calculate the requied licenses:
- Say you have an organisation with 500 users accessing Windows and SQL servers, the default would be to purchase 500 Windows User CAL’s and 500 SQL User CAL’s, but if we take a deeper look into the organisation we will see that they have a call center with 90 users in 3 shifts working on 30 Desktops, so the correct licensing should be to purchase 410 User CAL’s and 30 Device CAL’s, this will save the company 60 CAL’S and a cost savings of approximately $15,000.
- Let’s look at another example a company has 12,000 Desktops and Laptops and 10,000 employees (accessing Windows and SQL Servers), the simple solution would be to purchase either 12,000 Device CAL’s or 10,000 User CAL’s, but let’s take a deeper look, there are 3,000 users that have 2 Desktops (2 separate networks), 1,000 users have both a Desktop and Laptop, 2,000 employees do not have access to a PC (Blue collar workers) and the remaining have 1 Desktop. The optimized licensing scenario would be to purchase 4,000 User CAL’s (covering 8,000 Desktops) and 4,000 Device CAL’s for the entire organisation, resulting in a cost savings of over 2,000 CAL’s or approximately $400,000.
Plan carefully and understand you organizations needs and only then purchase licenses, saving money is all in the details.
