Need help in understanding Unity licensing

[tmoffett]

Hi,

We are comparing Unity VM only and UM licensing.

UM appears to be twice as expensive as VM only.

As I understand it, a runtime version of Exchange is provided with VM only, not with UM.

Given this, where does the Unified Messaging cost come from? Does Cisco have to pay Microsoft for some added client access license?

We already have an enterprise license for MS AD and Exchange 2000. Given that, I would have expected UM to be cheaper???

Can anyone help me understand the breakdown?

Thanks!

Tim Moffett

[lindborg]

We generally don’t get into pricing and licensing information out here – this forum is for technical questions/problems for the most part.

While I can’t go about justifying the prices that the product folks charge for various things for you here (I am, after all, but a lowly engineer) I _can_ tell you that we do have to cough up licenses to Microsoft once we start acting as an email client by reading emails and/or faxing the emails and attachments through our interfaces. This also covers the cost of the VMO extensions for all the users to use at their desktops. The cost of the TTS engine is also factored into the over all price here.

For VM only we got (after _much_ gnarly negotiations) special exceptions from Microsoft for far cheaper licensing for Exchange based on the assumption that it would only be used as the voice messaging storage (i.e. you cannot use that Exchange server for email services of any kind without violating your license agreement).

I don’t expect this is an entirely satisfactory answer for you but it’s about as good as we can do for you out here I’m afraid.