@Mark Takata (Adobe) Who can I reach out to regarding CF licensing questions around a SaaS application currently running CF? We are a small company operating with 3 enterprise licenses across 3 servers. 2 of which are public facing and used in round-robin load balancing, while the other is part of our fallback measures. After a recent architecture questionnaire requested by our account manager at Adobe, we're now being told we need to switch to annual licensing per client using our app, equating to over $100k a year. This coupled with a 3-year term and having to scale up if we pick up any more clients is a beyond impossible option for us. I'd say I'll reach out to our account manager, but I'm not interested in a sales pitch. I need a solution that's realistic for us. Thanks.

Tony, licensing questions and inquires ARE handled by the customer success & sales teams. There isn't some other "license" team, license = sales. Who is the person you was communicating with you regarding this?

^^^ this is why we dropped ACF after CF11, as we're a multi-client, small SaaS shop

Sure, I'll DM

Adobe wouldn't give any straight answers about this scenario and kept saying 'it depends, it depends'

This is the first I've seen this come up in the 2 years I've been here.

Much like @sknowlton, this is why we migrated from ACF to Lucee. We were told that any use of ACF in a SaaS environment would require license for every one of our customers, which simply was not reason nor fiscally possible.

I know someone who tried to buy through CDW, a standard 2 cpu license for cf2021. After months of hammering CDW which hammered Adobe, adobe came back for a small internal application, running on a vm that never handled more than a dozen users, they wanted 30K. Needless to say, the client spent all of half a day porting their code to Lucee. They were more than willing to buy the standard license, and upgrade support, but the licensing team seems to have a conceptual reality and or language problem that is causing massive issues for non-g customers.

That sounds like a mistake EW.

I expect this conversation usually happens quietly and obviously some entities just pay it or else Adobe wouldn't still be doing it. It's just been evident for a decade now that the licensing scheme Adobe wants is 'whatever will give us leverage to charge as much as we can based on circumstances as we perceive them' which is fine when your customers are faceless Fortune 500 companies that just expect to send a lot of money to Adobe every year without thinking too hard about it. On the handful of occasions something like this has come up publicly in the community, somebody makes a stink and either converts to Lucee or wrings concessions from Adobe that works when everybody is paying attention but not when it's a quiet email between a 'customer success manager' and a longtime customer. If I were an Adobe sales manager, @Mark Takata (Adobe) I'd do my best to make sure you didn't see it come up, because I'd know you'd be all up in my business about it. 🙂

There's something not being stated there

'ugh, Tony went to Mark. *does shots*'

Yes, well, it IS my job to be the voice of the customer internally.

Ha well, you've proven to help get us in the right direction to solutions Mark, which is why I called you out. Thanks for that.

I'll see what I can do to surface this internally.

It's a tight spot for us, as even considering Lucee is probably not gonna happen. Which leaves Java. I'm not opposed, but not looking forward to the work involved, but at the moment it would be cheaper for us lol.

100k a year seems steep, though I am unsure of the number of clients you're servicing.

~100 clients. So a little over 1k per client annually

In any case, I will see what I can do. I know the account manager, I'll chat with them and see where this is coming from.

The license terms clearly state that the software is licensed on a per-server basis: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/terms/enterprise/pdfs/PSLT-ColdFusion-WW-2022v2.pdf

Ya, that kind of structure is what we're used to. Adobe has a questionnaire that gathers details on the application to gauge license structure, which is what has happened to us now. I've heard of this happening in the past. No idea what the outcomes ever were, so they're known for doing this to companies. To be fair, we've never had an issue with Adobe or going through the licensing process. I've had more gripes as a developer over the years than actually administering the platform.

I would definitely try to avoid dealing directly with Adobe. Hopefully if you go through FusionReactor they won’t make the connection with the architecture questionnaire you filled out.

Thanks, certainly a few options to stress if things go sour, but I'm willing to persist a positive relationship with Adobe if we can. The decision makers would certainly feel more at ease, which is always a challenge to balance, lol.

Good luck!

@Mark Takata (Adobe) I actually talked to the guy trying to buy the license. He even reached out to Adobe directly and asked them how a small, vm that is set to 2 CPUS, 1 core per CPU running standard license could possibly be 30K. They had him send a cpu worksheet in the notes he even stated, It was internal, NEVER to be used in a public-facing environment. As I said, the "public" sales team has a conceptual problem. It maybe he did receive a "bad" group of sales persons working from off shore, but still. If He would have just gone to Adobe.com or any partner page and just purchased the software license, it would have been a done deal.

EW are you talking about Tony?

No, talking about someone I know who in 21 tried buying an AFC standard edition license.

A little update to my original inquiry... Mark was able to assist with clarifying our concerns to the team and kicking off further discussions with our account manager/sales to evaluate things. Thank you for that! Further review showed the proposed license model did not fit our company's usage after all, so we're now in ongoing talks on what our options are.