Mission Critical Email

Licensing

Mission Critical Email offers Zimbra Licensing and Support to Customers for their own Zimbra environments.

Understanding Zimbra Licensing
Zimbra’s Price Book for VARs (Value-Added Reseller Partners) contains nearly 450 SKUs, so choosing the right set of licenses that balance cost, features and risk is best done after a consultation.  For example, Zimbra has significant price breaks at license quantities of 250, 2,500, 10,000 and 25,000 mailboxes, so if you have 2,400 mailboxes it’s actually much less expensive to order licensing for 2,500 mailboxes.  For other customers, purchasing/renewing their own licensing can be avoided by migrating to Mission Critical Email’s hosting, which includes Zimbra licensing as part of the hosting costs.  All quotes and licenses are based on the number of mailboxes covered.

Zimbra Licensing Basics: Subscriptions, Licenses and Support
For Network Edition, you need a license and a Support contract.  When you buy a 12- or 24-month Subscription, you are actually buying a bundled term license and Support contract all in one.  This minimizes your up-front outlay, but if you can make a four-year or longer commitment to Zimbra, you will save money by buying a Perpetual license up front and then Annual Support.  It’s more money up front for the Perpetual license, but the Annual Support is much less than a 12- or 24-month Subscription, so the breakeven between Subscriptions and Perpetual licensing typically occurs after year three.

Open Source Customers can buy a Support contract with or without the Zextras Suite Plus.  It’s a lower cost than Network Edition, but there is no Outlook Connector, no Two-Factor Authentication, no Exchange Interoperability, no Active Directory authentication, no Archiving and Discovery and several other missing features.  For many companies, deploying Open Source Edition was a smart choice at the time of deployment, but as your company’s reliance on email has increased, as has the demand for features only available in Network Edition, we encourage Open Source customers looking for paid Support to consider the marginal step-up costs of migrating to Network Edition at the same time.  Further, when you compare the lower Support response times/methods for Open Source Support against Network Edition Support response times, the slower Open Source response times may not be a good buy when all is said and done.

Advanced Zimbra Licensing Tips
Here are three tips we see repeatedly in the market:

  1. Companies often buy the quantity of licenses they need at the time of purchase, and then before the term is up they find they need more mailboxes.  We can sell you an increased number of Subscriptions, or Perpetual Licenses and Support of course, and at the same time, we can coterminate your existing license with the term of the new add-ons.  This protects you from price increases for a longer period.
  2. Too many times Perpetual license holders fail to renew their Support contracts, and a year or two later find they need to open a Support Case with Zimbra.  Bad News: To do that you have to buyback Support all the way back to the date you allowed Support to lapse, plus a 20% reinstatement fee.  Worse News: You can’t open the Support Case until the Support contract paperwork is completed and the contract paid for.  So if you have a “system down” situation you are going to have to wait at least two more days to be able to open a Support Case.  Please, please, please don’t let your Support contract go unrenewed!
  3. Money-Saving Secret:  Zimbra Hosting Licenses are much less expensive than buying your own Zimbra Subscription or Perpetual License/Support. But, the caveat is that you have to host with a Zimbra BSP (Business Service Provider, a.k.a. Hosting Partner) on the Hosting Provider’s infrastructure.  There are very, very few Zimbra Partners like Mission Critical Email that are both VAR and BSP partners and who also provide Professional Services, so if your company is on a transition to Cloud hosting from on-premises hosting, you could save even more money by hosting with Mission Critical Email.  We can walk you through a price comparison to see what works better for you.

Ready to start a Zimbra Licensing conversation or need a quote?  Fill in the form and let’s get started!

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