We are celebrating at Mestrelab these days, and not only because our 5th anniversary is approaching (more on that on a later post), but also because we have exceeded a milestone we are very proud of: we now have more than 50 academic institutions with perpetual campus licenses for Mnova NMR!

Amongst them, there are many very prestigious names, including, but not comprehensively, as I am only mentioning some of those who have given permission to be mentioned on our web communications:

• Yale University
• Caltech
• University of Rhode Island
• Princeton University
• The Scripps Research Institute
• ETH Zurich
• University of Ulm
• Munchen TU
• University of Munster
• Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT
• Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
• Simon Fraser University
  University of Colorado at Boulder
• University of Barcelona
• Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona
• CSIC
• CNRS
• …

So why have these guys decided to go with a campus license of Mnova? I think there are several very obvious and very compelling reasons. I could expand on that and add more, but I want to keep this short and simple:

1. This allows them to give all their faculty, researchers and students access to the same platform to process, visualize and report NMR and LC/GC/MS data, independently of the NMR/MS equipment they are working with (with some exceptions in the case of MS, contact us to find out more)
2. They can accommodate Windows (including Windows 7 ), Mac OS and Linux users with one single software application (this is for the NMR and NMRPredict Desktop plugins at present)
3. The licensing is extremely flexible and allows users to work at remote locations even when not connected to the institution’s network (read more about licensing here), so this is great for processing and visualizing data whilst at conferences, working from home, writing up a PhD on a mountain retreat,…
4. Perpetual campus licenses are excellent value for money with a very low cost per head (you can find out more about pricing at our Store ). Just for example, for a University with 300 users, the PERPETUAL license for the NMR plugin works out at around €42 per user, and that is without considering the fact that new users in future will also be able to use the software, so in the long run the institution is looking at €10/€20 per user.

Of course, if any of you reading this are at an institution with a campus license, it would be great to see a comment about your main reasons to buy it, you know better than me!

Free 120 day Campus Trial

What do you do if your institution does not have a campus license yet? The good news is that you now have a great opportunity to try this out and see how it may work for you. We are giving away 120 day campus license installations for all Mnova plugins, to allow institutions to give ALL their users full access to our software for a limited time period and thus evaluate the level of interest in their community and the usefulness of the software in their working day. If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity, all you have to do is Contact Us mentioning BLOG-CAMPUS LICENSE in the subject. We will give you all the instructions and get your institution set up with its campus license in no time! Just imagine all those happy users processing

And just one more thing before I go for today: if you finally decide to get a campus (or other) license for your institution, do not forget that you can donate, at no cost, a similar license to an institution in less developed countries, within our NMR For All program.

Santi marketing campus licenses, customers, licenses, Mnova 13 comments Leave a comment

As promised on my last post of a couple of days ago, there are a few things pending, mainly:

• ESOR 2009 trip report (Haifa, Israel)
• SMASH 2009 trip report (Chamonix, France)
• More on the current MS market status for software and the arguments for a tool such as Mnova MS.

All this is coming very soon, but, after seeing this specific question a number of times over the last few days, I wanted to blog about it to make things clearer for our users/potential users out there.

The ideal license model for you will depend on 2 things:

1. How many people will be using the software at your institution or company
2. How intensively it will be used

You have 2 options based on license model (I am ignoring nominated licenses here as this post is concerned with licenses for a whole company or institution and not for individuals/small groups):

1. Campus or Site License
2. Concurrent License

Campus or Site License

The way this works is that you have a maximum number of installations (50/100/150/unlimited).

We provide you with a license server program, which you install, and a license file for the license server (you can check out the instructions for this here). You can then distribute this license file to as many users as you want. What then happens is, these users use the license file to activate the software. Each time a user activates the software, they count as an active user, whether they are using the software or not. When you get to the limit of, for example, 150 people who activated the software, nobody else can activate it.

Concurrent License

These are also known as floating licenses or seats. What you buy is a number of seats for simultaneous usage.

This works as follows: we give you a license server and license file exactly the same as before. An UNLIMITED number of users can activate the software, but only a given number can use it simultaneously. For example, imagine you bought 5 seats – you can have 400 people activated but, at any given time, only 5 can use it. If an additional user tries to use it at that time, they get a message saying the licenses are taken up and they have to try later. (One important aspect to consider is that the lack of limitations for installation is a particularity of Mestrelab, concurrent licenses from other vendors may limit BOTH the number of installations and the simultaneous usage)

• Advantages: This is a cheap alternative if you have a very high number of installations with people who hardly ever use the software

• Disadvantages: If people use the software quite intensively, they will soon take up the available licenses and this results in disruption for other users, who cannot access it when they need it. The other disadvantage is that people have to be connected to the network to be able to use the software, as they need the license server to release a license to them. (This is not entirely true, a seat could be booked to an user if requested from the license server administrator and granted, but of course, this will tie that seat up for the whole period that user has requested).

Our advice.

So, which license you need depends on the 2 parameters I included at the beginning. For academia, we don’t find concurrent licenses work well, as too many people use the software too much and the prices are very much biased towards making the software available to everyone/everywhere/everytime (for the price of approximately 10 seats you can buy an unlimited campus license, and for a 150 user license you can buy around 7 seats – the chances in a community like yours are that more than 7 people will need to use the software at the same time on a regular basis). In industry, this is not so cut and dry.

You can find the prices of all these license packages at our store.

You can read more on the types of licenses here:

• What are campus licenses and why should I have them?
• Should I have concurrent or nominated licenses?

Of course, should you have any questions or love the license model so much you have to buy a license, just write to us at sales@mestrelab.com.

Santi marketing licenses, packages, store No comments Leave a comment