Kentico Licensing in Version 6.0

Note for partners: If you're a Kentico Solution Partner, please read a partner version of this blog post including partner price list at Kentico Partner Portal (logon required).

Kentico CMS 6.0 will be a huge step for Kentico and our clients as we are going to add a new product line – Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS) – that will bring additional enterprise and on-line marketing features. This product will be focused on medium and large clients.

First, I'd like to clarify one thing: We are not doing any changes to Kentico CMS licensing as you know it. All the features that you currently get in Kentico CMS will be still available for the same price. Plus, we are adding many new features and improvements to Kentico CMS in version 6.0 and we will continue adding new features to Kentico CMS in the future as well.

The following figure shows how both products will coexist in version 6:



The new product Kentico EMS will be based on Kentico CMS and it will enhance it with additional features focused on two areas:

• On-line Marketing Features
  • Contact Management – single point for managing all contacts received through your website and tracking their activities on the website
  • Segmentation – identifying customer interests and profiling visitors based on their behavior and attributes
  • Lead Scoring – scoring the value of the contacts, identifying hot leads
  • Content Personalization – delivering relevant content customized to the particular visitor based on visitor behavior and profile
  • E-mail marketing – advanced features enhancing the Newsletter module: open e-mail tracking, click-through tracking, bounced e-mails. These features will be also available in Kentico CMS in version 6.0, but some additional e-mail marketing features added in later versions may be only available in Kentico EMS.
• Additional Enterprise Features:
  • Health Monitoring – tracking system health through performance counters in Microsoft Windows
  • Load Balanced SMTP Mail Servers – ability to send e-mails through multiple mail servers for higher performance
  • Scheduler Windows Service – execution of scheduled tasks using an external service running as a Windows Service rather than in web application context

The new Kentico EMS aims at the mid-market and enterprise CMS segments and our goal is to provide a product that is more attractive and competitive in these segments.

Kentico EMS Licensing

Kentico EMS licensing will use a similar schema as Kentico CMS. You will be able to purchase Kentico EMS 1 Website License ($14,999), 1 Server License for 10 Sites ($24,999) and 1 Server License for Unlimited Sites ($39,999). If you need to add just one additional website license on the same server, you won't pay another $14,999, but only $2,999.

Kentico CMS, our existing product, will be still available for the same price and with same feature set plus many new features and improvements added in 6.0.

Below, you can see the price list for Kentico EMS:



Below, you can see the major new features in version 6.0 and their availability in particular licenses. The green rows represent features that are only available in Kentico EMS. Kentico EMS already includes all features of Kentico CMS Ultimate Edition.
 

Upgrades for Existing Clients

Every client who owns Kentico CMS 5.x and a valid maintenance will be able to upgrade to Kentico EMS for the price difference with 50% discount by the end of 2011 and 20% after that. If the license was purchased through a partner, the actual paid and new (partner) price are used to calculate the price difference.

Examples:
 

1. An end client owns Kentico CMS 1 Website Ultimate License before the 6.0 release and wants to upgrade to Kentico EMS 1 Website License. The price difference is $14,999 - $4,499 = $10,500; the upgrade price is only $5,250 by the end of 2011 or $8,400 after that.
2. An end client purchased Kentico CMS 1 Website Ultimate License and 1 Website Base License with E-commerce package before the 6.0 release and wants to upgrade both sites to Kentico EMS. The client originally paid $7,997 and now the client needs Kentico EMS 1 Website License + 1 Additional Website License ($14,999 + $2,999 = $17,998). The price difference is $17,998 - $7,997 = $10,001. The upgrade price is only $5,000 by the end of 2011 and $8,000 after that.

Upgrades for Multi-client Server Licenses and Unlimited Licenses

Partners who currently own a multi-client Server License or Unlimited License and have a valid maintenance will be able to purchase the Kentico EMS License for each website that was finished before the end of 2011. This is not an upgrade, it's a purchase of a new license that will be independent of the original multi-client license. These partners will be able to buy Kentico EMS licenses for such clients with 50% discount by the end of 2012.

It means if one of your clients is currently covered by your Server or Unlimited license, you will be able to buy a new Kentico EMS 1 Website License for this client for $7,500 before partner discount. In this case, you will keep your Unlimited license and your client will get their own, independent license.
 

Free EMS License for Partners

Our Gold Certified Solution Partners will receive a free license of Kentico EMS for their own website. All partners will receive a free development license they can use on their local machine for development, learning and demoing Kentico EMS.
 

Kentico as an Enterprise-Class CMS

We believe that with Kentico EMS, we will introduce an attractive product for mid-market and enterprise clients. In the past two years, we've been working diligently on moving Kentico to the enterprise level in several areas:

• Technology:
  • We dramatically improved Kentico CMS performance, scalability and stability and we have numerous clients who have successfully deployed Kentico for websites with high traffic (a small sample can be found here: http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Petr-Passinger/September-2010/Top-3-websites-with-the-highest-traffic-running-on.aspx).
  • We support Windows Azure and have a large number of clients running Kentico in the cloud (Azure, Amazon, Rackspace), so the enterprise clients can leverage cloud for virtually unlimited scalability.
  • We did a security review of the whole product and improved our development process to deliver a highly secure solution.
• Support:
  • We started 24/7 support on July 1, 2011 and we will be offering Service Level Agreements (SLA) to clients with mission critical projects.
  • We introduced a unique 7-day bug-fixing policy that allows us to quickly address any issues.
  • We introduced Kentico Consulting Services that provide advanced guidance to clients who have special needs that go beyond our standard support.
• Marketing and Sales:
  • We have started offices in the US and UK which makes us an international company that can cater to global organizations.
  • We are working on inclusion of Kentico in various industry reports. We are already covered by The Real Story Group, Ars Logica, Hartman GIDS, CMS Critic, Common Sense Advisory, The 451 Group and we work on being covered by Gartner and other analyst groups.
  • We have a large number of high-profile reference clients and case studies that demonstrate Kentico capabilities and ability to handle enterprise-class projects.
• Partner network:
  • We improved the structure of our partner network so that we can recommend clients a partner that represents the best fit for the given project. With 1,200 partners in 80 countries, Kentico has the largest partner network from all .NET CMS vendors (based on the publicly available information) which means international clients can find partners who take care of their local website projects in most of the developed countries in the world.
• Education:
  • We started a training and certification program. Our training partners deliver local training across dozens of countries.
  • We invested heavily into documentation and other education materials, including Deliver Now! Methodology and walkthrough videos. You will see many improvements in documentation in version 6.

As you can see, we did a huge amount of work over the past two years to better cater to the needs and expectations of enterprise clients. We are aware of some missing features and things that need to be improved, but Kentico EMS will cover a large number of these features and we will deliver the rest of them in the next versions. 

Should you have any questions on the new licensing, please post them below or send an e-mail to sales@kentico.com.