Citrix licensing does it really cost a 100 times more?

DATE: July 20th 2010

Before making a comparison, there's some background information which needs to be understood about how campus agreements work.

FTE counts

Campus agreements base the number of licenses required by an academic organisation on the Full Time Equivalent (FTE) count. These FTE counts are an estimate of the number of full time staff who could potentially use the vendors technology.

So an academic organisation with 10,000 staff, won't necessarily have a 10,000 FTE count when it comes to staff using Microsoft Windows for example. As some of the staff will work as cleaners, cooks, gardeners, in maintenance and other jobs which don't involve the use of computers. The FTE count will try to reflect this, by reducing the overall FTE count for the academic institution in question.

An academic institution with say 10,000 staff therefore may only have 7,000 members of staff who use computers in their line of work, which could mean an FTE count of 7,000 is taken by the vendor as acceptable.

Another consideration used in calculating FTE counts is part time staff, who may be grouped together reducing the count further. So for every three members of staff who are part time, this could be treated as one FTE equivalent.

So if there are 7,000 FTE staff, let's assume 3,000 are part time and the vendor considers 3 part time staff as 1 FTE. This would result in only a 1,000 FTE count for the part time staff, which when combined with the remaining 4,000 FTE count (7,000 staff minus 3,000 part time staff) results in a FTE count of only 5,000.

In this example an academic institution with 10,000 staff, only has to consider purchasing 5,000 licenses to meet it's licensing obligations instead of buying a license for each member of staff.

Staff FTE and Student FTE

Academic institutions will generally have two FTE counts, one for staff and one for students. Again the same criteria may apply as used in determining staff FTE counts as for students, such as 3 part time students are considered as 1 FTE.