Licensing, subscription, and overages

IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management Extended SaaS (ELM SaaS) services and extra charges vary by size of subscription.

In ELM SaaS, licenses are served by a floating license server and Tivoli® Directory Server provides the LDAP-based user management. Available services and required extra charges vary by size of subscription.

Comparison of SaaS levels of service

Table 1. Comparison of SaaS levels of service
Feature	Up to 100 authorized users	More than 100 authorized users
SaaS offerings
IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® Next (DOORS Next) IBM Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) IBM Engineering Test Management (ETM) IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Engineering Insights (ENI) IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody® - Model Manager (RMM) Track and Plan on Cloud	X	X
ELM Base that includes, IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next (DOORS Next) IBM Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) IBM Engineering Test Management (ETM) Track and Plan on Cloud	X	X
ELM Extended that includes, ELM Base IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Engineering Insights (ENI) IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody - Model Manager (RMM)	X	X
Security compliance
Choice of approved data centers	X	X
IPsec site-to-site VPN connection	Add-on with extra cost	X
SaaS hosted image set-up
Scaling included in the base	X	X
DOORS Next, ETM, configuration management, and global configuration management	X - Available upon request	X - Available upon request
Creation and provisioning of hosted image	X	X
Capacity to integrate with in-house deployed tools	Add-on with extra cost	X
Setup services
Open LDAP and dedicated directory for user authentication	X	X
Use of customer LDAP for user authentication	Add-on with extra cost	X
Customer provided URLs and certificates	Standard URLs are provided by IBM	X - Customer provided URLs and certificates are allowed

Depending on the size of your organization and your projects, you can choose the service level that is right for you.

Note: IBM deploys ELM SaaS in a virtual private cloud (VPC) to data centers in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia. IBM considers these deployments for you based on your specific requirements.

Table 2. Comparing ELM SaaS service offerings
Feature	Up to 100 authorized users	More than 100 authorized users
Infrastructure and hosted image support
Data storage	200 gigabytes	200 gigabytes
24 x 7 support (severity 1 outages)	X	X
24 x 5 support	X	X
Service-level objective availability is 99.9%	X	X
Monitoring services and metrics for capacity planning	X	X
Patch and upgrade installation	X - On IBM schedule	X - Planned with customer
Daily backup and recovery	X	X
Patch and upgrade installation on your schedule		X
Server Side Customizations Examples of Server Side Customizations that can be considered include: LTPA (lightweight third-party authentication) timeout changes Custom Report Templates that need to be installed on the server. Custom widgets Note: Each request is considered individually		X
Secure, single-tenant instance of dedicated cloud space on the public internet	X
Secure, single-tenant Virtual Private Cloud instance of dedicated cloud space, which is connected directly to your internal network with an encrypted virtual private network tunnel		X
Software upgrades
Software upgrades	7 days customer notice for major upgrades	Coordinated with the customer; requires downtime over a weekend
New product version upgrades and fixes are part of the base service	X	X
Product version upgrades are released to SaaS within 45 days of the release	X	X
iFixes per pre-defined schedule.	X	X
Client Management
Client Engagement	X	X

Note: A user of IBM Track and Plan on the cloud is equivalent to 1/3 of an authorized user in determining service level. This is applicable to all the offerings and features identified in Table 1 and Table 2.

Subscriptions

ELM SaaS is offered on a monthly subscription; you subscribe to a certain usage during the month. Users per month (UPM) are the greatest number of users who are logged on to the service during the applicable calendar month.

Example:

You subscribe to 100-users-per-month for 12 months.

During month 1, 80 users are registered and they all login. You are charged for 100 subscribed users for the first month.
During month 2, the number of registered users increases to 150 but only 110 login. You are charged for 100 subscribed users with an overage charge for 10 users. These 10 users are charged by using overage part numbers, which carry a 25% premium.
During month 3, the number of registered users increase to 350 but only 95 users log in. You are charged for 100 subscribed users.

You can start with only 10 users a month for a commitment of 12 to 60 months for the ELM SaaS offerings identified in Table 1.

You can't reduce the number of subscribed users during the term of your contract, such as starting with 205 users and then reducing the number of users to 150. You can cancel your subscription at the end of the contract term, and enter into a new subscription, with a lower number of users. For details, see: IBM Cloud Services Agreement for termination policy guidelines. For general Cloud services terms, see: Cloud Services terms.

Authorized users are shown as floating licenses

IBM provisions SaaS to provide floating flexibility, at authorized user pricing. IBM provisions the environment so that you can simply add as many users to the system as you want, while you are charged only for those unique users who log in during a given month. If IBM deployed only authorized user licenses, you’d have the burden of reallocating licenses to specific users, and other users would receive out-of-license messages whenever you reached the authorized user limit. Provisioning with authorized user licenses also increases operational costs because IBM must issue a new license key every time you want to increase or decrease usage because of a planned or unplanned overage.

Concurrent user subscriptions

IBM SaaS offerings offer a concurrent user subscription metrics. Concurrent users are the persons who are accessing the cloud service at any particular point in time. With concurrent user metric, subscriptions can be more cost effective than unique user metrics. You subscribe to the average number of users accessing the environment at the same time in a month, instead of subscribing for every unique user that might need access in a given month, regardless of frequency. Concurrent user subscriptions allow you to provide cost-effective access to:

Give insight to executives and managers through dashboards and cross project views.
Broaden your organizational reach, with no worry about infrequent or light users.
Retain legacy accounts without impacting your subscription totals.

A concurrent user is a person who is accessing the cloud service at any particular point in time: Regardless of whether the person is simultaneously accessing the cloud service multiple times, the person counts only as a single concurrent user. You must obtain entitlements for the maximum number of concurrent users simultaneously accessing the cloud service in any manner directly or indirectly by any means per month, or as specified in your Client's Transaction Document.

You must choose one metric per environment to measure usage by: either Authorized (Unique) User or Concurrent.
If you already have a subscription to ELM SaaS or ELM Base SaaS offerings, you cannot add concurrent user subscriptions to your existing authorized user subscriptions.
If you already have an authorized user subscription, but you prefer a concurrent user metric, you either must wait until your existing subscription terminates, or work with your seller to see whether you are eligible to replace your current authorized user subscription with a new concurrent user subscription.
If you subscribe to a concurrent subscription, we can limit the number of licenses that are deployed to only what is subscribed to avoid a pay per use or overage subscription. In this model, you would receive an out of license error message when the peak concurrent user capacity is reached. Work with your seller if you want to limit users in this way.
IBM provides all infrastructure-related support, which includes patches, fixes, and upgrades.
You pay for subscription services on a monthly per concurrent user basis. There is a minimum of five concurrent users.
Peak concurrent usage is calculated as the highest number of authenticated users with simultaneous usage within 1-hour intervals over the monthly measurement period.
SaaS offerings that provide concurrent user licenses include those identified in Table 1.

The concurrent user subscription model is similar to a floating license model.

User role

ELM SaaS subscription is simplified to provide only one user role, Practitioner, equivalent to the ELM Practitioner role in the on-premises version, which allows you to write requirements, create plans, and create and manage work items and test cases. Hence, there are no equivalent SaaS user subscriptions to the on-premises Contributor, Stakeholder, or Workgroups for ELM Base SaaS, including EWM on Cloud, DOORS Next on Cloud, and ETM on Cloud.

Table 3. User role
Cloud offering	Equivalent on-premises license
ELM Base SaaS	ELM Base SaaS Practitioner
DOORS Next on Cloud	DOORS Next Analyst
EWM on Cloud	EWM Developer
ETM on Cloud	ETM Professional
IBM Track and Plan on Cloud	ELM Base SaaS, DOORS Next, EWM, and ETM Contributor

For more information about client licenses, see Client access license management overview.

Pay Per Use/Overage

When you subscribe to this Cloud Service, you select a user subscription level, and you can flex up and down in users from this level. When you flex above your subscription level, you pay for active user use, above the subscription level as overage. This price is typically 25% more than the subscription price. You can avoid paying overage by subscribing to the same number of unique users that have access to the Cloud Service.