Citrix Access Suite 4 for Windows Server 2003: The Official Guide, Third Edition

In most organizations, IT expenses are often allocated on the basis of somewhat arbitrary criteria, such as a percentage of sales. On the other hand, commercial application service providers (ASPs) must charge their customers fees that are clearly based upon usage of their application hosting services. By utilizing Citrix to create an on-demand enterprise, IT can become a corporate computing utility, provisioning software as a service. This enables them to apply a similar billing model as a commercial ASP to their organization's internal customers. The advantage is greater accountability as departments, offices, and users quickly understand the costs of IT resources they consume . By adjusting their consumption habits to minimize IT expenses, the entire organization benefits. This model also tends to spotlight the types of hidden IT costs that frequently plague many organizations utilizing a client-centric model of computing. For purposes of this model, we'll refer to accessing applications hosted on Citrix Presentation Server as part of the on-demand enterprise as a corporate ASP.

MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION FEES

IT can charge users a monthly subscription fee structured like a cable company bill. Each user and each remote office are charged a basic monthly fee for utilizing the Corporate ASP. Additional fees cover supplementary applications, services, and changes. Account change fees help to ensure that users remain conscious of the administrative costs their requests for system modifications entail.

Basic User Fees

Basic user fees are monthly charges for products and services necessary for a user to access the corporate ASP. For example, a department with ten user accounts would be charged a basic monthly fee for each of the ten named users to receive help desk support and the necessary hardware, software, and disk space.

• – Help desk support The basic user fee should include a charge for help desk support. An access platform both greatly simplifies the user computing environment and allows help desk personnel to "shadow" user sessions. Password Manager by itself should reduce the average help desk support requests by 25 percent.

• – Network device Users require a PC, laptop, Macintosh, UNIX workstation, or Windows terminal in order to access the Corporate ASP. Although it probably makes more sense to let departments pay for their own equipment, IT does need to set a price for access.

• – Disk space The basic subscription fee should include a certain amount of disk space in the corporate data center.

• – Basic software suite Users will have access to the standard corporate software suite such as Microsoft Office and e-mail. This suite should include virus-protection software and all licensing costs for accessing Terminal Server and Citrix Presentation Server.

Basic Office Fees

The monthly basic office fee covers the expense of putting a remote office onto the corporate ASP. The charges might be categorized by size of office, as described in Appendix B and as shown here:

• – Shared disk space in the corporate data center Remote offices may require shared disk space in excess of the amount for individual users.

• – Bandwidth The monthly fee should include the cost of connectivity as well as the cost of bandwidth management and support.

• – Printing Large remote offices often have print servers, and small offices use print management hardware at the corporate data center. General office fees should cover basic printing, using corporate standard printers.

• – Administrative support The monthly fee can also include a basic level of administrative support for each office.

Extra User Fees

As with a cable company, IT can tack on additional charges for additional services. The following table shows an example of basic and additional monthly subscription fees.

Some of the categories of additional fees are as follows :

• – Nonstandard software While the Application Isolation Environment capabilities of Citrix Presentation Server 4 now enable applications incompatible with each other to run safely side by side, nonstandard corporate applications can still require more staff time to understand and configure. Unusually resource- intensive or 16-bit applications may be more expensive to host. In these cases, users requiring access to these nonstandard corporate applications should be charged more.

• – Hardware types It generally costs slightly more to maintain and support a PC configured as a Windows terminal than it does to support a genuine Windows terminal. A laptop user who runs applications both locally and through the corporate ASP will likely require significantly more support. IT can tack on additional charges depending upon the type of hardware utilized and the degree to which the user operates in complete thin-client mode.

• – Additional disk space IT can charge users extra for additional data storage requirements.

• – Local devices Local devices such as printers and scanners can be charged appropriately.

• – Access from home A small charge might be levied for employees who want to work from home as well as from the office, though an access platform makes this process painless. IT may instead choose to bundle this service as part of the basic monthly user fees in order to encourage working from home.

Extra Office Fees

IT can charge extra fees to remote offices requiring additional storage space or printing requirements beyond the basics. New users or application changes also fall into this category.

Account Change Fees

In order to help foster computing efficiency throughout the organization, IT may wish to charge remote offices or departments for each account change. An account change is a new account setup or an addition or deletion to a user or office account. For example, adding or deleting a specific application to a user or group desktop would be an account change. An account change would also take place if an office decided to increase or decrease its shared disk space at the data center.