Licence Renewal - How to get the full term paid for

[TonySmith]

Hi,

I was wondering what is the best tactic when renewing licences, to make sure that you get the full term you paid for.  Our customers (naturally) expect that if they pay for three years, their renewal date will be extended for three years.  However it seems with Meraki that for various reasons they knock off a few days.  For example if the licence is issued by Meraki late one evening, but only applied the next day, then that's one day deducted.   As another example not yet confirmed, I think they don't count leap years so a three year licence is actually 1095 days, losing another day in almost all cases.  These are all examples where the dashboard was renewed well before the existing renewal date, which is what you would expect Meraki to encourage. 

In contrast a couple of customers left their renewals late, into the grace period.  In both cases they have been give more than the term paid for, for example previous renewal date of 18th July, licence applied on 12th August, new renewal date 12 August.

It can't be right that Meraki is in fact rewarding customers who leave their renewals late, and penalising those who renew in good time, but that is the actual effect.

[Bruce]

With the co-term licensing model the license counter starts from the day the license is issued by Meraki, and as the name suggests, co-terms with all other licenses. This often means you might lose a day or two up front, and maybe it looks like you only get a portion of your license because you’re extending all license. I’m sure you are fully across this due to the way you describe it.

If you want a clean cut license model then you could move to the Per Device Licensing model. In this model a license is assigned to a device and so is always for the length of the license. In addition, you also get a 90-day grace period to allow the license to be applied to a device before the license clock starts ticking. If your license runs out, it’s also only that one device that stops working.

But Per Device Licensing is a one-way street. Once you enable it there is no going back to co-term, not even through a support call. Have a read here, https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Licensing/Meraki_Per-Device_Licensing_Overvi....

[TonySmith]

"maybe it looks like you only get a portion of your license because you’re extending all license"

I understand that although it's a different issue, we see that when adding devices and it sometimes needs to be explained to a customer.

In the renewal cases I'm referring to the new licence was applied as a renewal, to a co-termed organisation, and covering all the devices in their networks.

Meanwhile if I read Meraki's initial response correctly, they have confirmed that they view three years as being 1095 days.  So it sounds like they don't know about leap years, which is what I suspected.  I suspect I'll hit the normal Cisco type brick wall but I think this is unreasonable, and also unreasonable to issue licences well outside working hours, then blame the customer for not acting on them the same day.

[BrandonS]

I struggle with this too and my own customers have figured it out and often ask me why they should order renewals until 2-3 weeks into their grace period.  I don't have a good answer and am still a bit leery of converting many orgs to PDL because it seems harder to keep track of and manage on my side.

[TonySmith]

I've steered away from per device as well.  It seems OK I think to start with, but once devices are added I think it could become a bag of worms with manual co-terming etc.   Not as easy as Smartnet where you can just select all items and set a common end date.

It seems to me that unless we can persuade Meraki to play fair, the only way to avoid customers getting short changed is to hold off their renewal order until they're into the grace period.  I don't like that as it either means leaving things to the last minute, or getting the customer's go ahead well in advance but then sitting on their order before placing it with Meraki.  It would be easy to mess up I think, and looks bad to the customer to have licence alerts on their dashboard.  

[PhilipDAth]

The last three-year licence I got for a customer was for 1098 days.  This means each year has 366 days long.  So you don't need to worry about that leap year issue.

[TonySmith]

Meraki have explicitly told me that this latest three year licence is 1095 days.

"The new date has been calculated 1095 days from March 11 2021 (start date of new license)"