[j-nsp] Junos feature licensing?

[Paul Schultz]

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Raymond Macharia wrote:

> I have already faced this huge road block when trying to recommend to
> management that we switch to Juniper.
> I hope someone from Juniper is feeling this rumblings

Let's stop pretending this is a new practice in the industry.  Cisco and 
others for as long as I can remember have had additional licenses, various 
software feature sets at various price tags, and loads of additional line 
items on the quote that seem quite silly.  The only thing that's happened 
here is Juniper is now following the same annoying software pricing
structure as their competitors.

Whether it's IPv6, SSH/Crypto, SNA, MPLS, "Inter-domain Routing License" 
or whatever.. Let's not pretend that the main competitor here hasn't
been doing stuff like this for YEARS.

All you really have to do is say "I'm not paying for an IPv6 license.. If 
Cisco doesn't charge for one I'm buying Cisco instead." - that alone will 
probably get you the v6 "license" for free or however many percentage 
points off the price tag to make up the difference.  Vendors are there to 
be beat up, when they know they're going head to head with their arch
rivals they can do some pretty creative things to win the deal.

In my experience Juniper has been much better to deal with about these 
kinds of situations than others..  I can't speak much about say a one time 
purchase of a single M7i, but if you're looking to spend a good amount of 
money they'll break before you do on something as trivial as an IPv6 
license.

If they actually lose business as a result of it, it will go away.


My unlicensed $.02


Paul