@rolfk wrote:
The Enterprise license is a multi user license, I think at least 5 seats but you can opt for more of course. It means you have to install a license server on your premise that can manage the actual users and each user has to configure in his NI License Manager the server address to request a license from.It is and has been for a long time (quite some years before the move to a complete subscription only sale) a subscription type license, so you have to pay every year to be allowed to use it. The price obviously can vary greatly depending on how many users you want to have an active license for. The license server will actively refuse to hand out a new license if you reach the limit of allowed licenses for your account. But once a user quits LabVIEW, that license gets again available for another user. The actual prices also vary a bit depending on region.
So the only person who can actually give you a fairly accurate price would be some NI sales representative, after you told them for how many users and what software packages and Toolkits you want a license for.
That's not entirely accurate. You don't have to run your own license server, although NI doesn't really give any good means of tracking your usage otherwise. We've had a VLA for many years but only recently got our own server up and running.
You also need to have a VLA to use concurrent licenses, but you don't have to use concurrent licenses if you have a VLA. So it's not strictly true that licenses will be available for use by another user unless you are opting into that license model. I wanted to switch to concurrent for a long time, but our NI rep always seemed a bit cagey about it... Finally a new guy told us concurrent licenses are priced as 3x the cost of non-concurrent. I'm not sure if that is typical for other programs that offer both models, but to me that seems a little absurd. In any case, that would have either drastically increased costs or drastically reduced the number of seats, so we stuck with non-concurrent licenses. As a consequence, we need to manually reassign them when we need to move them from one user to another. That's doable for the way we work, and at least now that we are managing them through our own server we have good visibility on how they are assigned.
@krispiekream wrote:
my manager is asking and I dont know what to tell him. I called customer service and they said they will get back to me and thats the follow up question I have. I was hoping to get an answer. 😞
As others have said, it varies by region and other factors.
How many seats do you need? I can tell you that for our small VLA, the price per license is the same as the single-seat licenses shown on the NI site. The VLA gives us better tools to manage activations across the organization and makes renewals easier. You don't pay extra for that, but, at least in my experience, you don't get discounts on the licenses either.
Maybe it's different for larger VLAs with more seats. NI isn't terribly transparent about such things, so I have no idea if that's the case or what the thresholds would be for number of seats.
