[Update: Once James Fee linked to this blog, the comments started to pile up over at his site. Here's a link to them.]

[DISCLAIMER: I do not work for ESRI, not do I represent any official stance on licensing. This is how I understand things from talking with ESRI. I'm fully willing to ammend this posting if ESRI has substantially changed their policy from what is described here.]

Ok - I'm not the first one to post the "reported" price for ArcGIS Server - someone else did in comments on James Fee's blog. Anyhow, I've been looking around the ESRI ArcGIS Server pages for the list pricing, and have not found anything. So, for this post, lets use $XX,XXX instead of specifics. The actual dollar price is not my point here. Suffice to say that ArcGIS Server is not cheap, but the devil is in the details.

The other thing I've been looking for on-line is the actual licensing breakdown for the ArcGIS Server components. Since the server has multiple components (SDE, SOC, SOM and ADF), I want to know how those pieces are licensed, and how I should expect to configure a system.

In particular I want to know how the pricing changes if you run ArcSDE on a separate machine, and the ADF on a separate web server. I'm not sure about how you do things, but typically when I'm building a web application, I assume it's going to be running on a web server. The geodatabase will be on a separate DBMS box, and (for server) the SOM/SOC is on a dedicated server. This is what we've been instructed to do in the past, so I'd assume this is the model to move forward with.

First, ArcSDE. The deal is that while you "get" ArcSDE with ArcGIS Server, if you want to run the ArcSDE "service", the DBMS and the service must be on the ArcGIS Server box. If it's not on that server, then you must pay full per-socket pricing for the DBMS server. Ok - this is pretty much how the ArcSDE pricing model went. If you choose to use 'direct connect' then you leave the "licenses" on the ArcGIS Server machine, and simply connect to the DBMS server - at no additional cost.

Conclusion: Direct connect is gonna get a whole lot more common.

Next up - the Web ADF. Since the Web ADF has all kinds of cool functionality, I was really interested to see if there was a licensing fee for deploying it. At ArcGIS Server 9.1, you had the ADF Runtime that you could install on the target webserver - there was no separate licinsing for this component. So, I had high hopes. But, what I've come to learn (by talking with ESRI because it's not published anywhere I can find) is that the ADF is licensed at 9.2. And it's not just a little run-time cost. It's the full per-socket price of the server. That's right - if you want to run your web site on a different system from your SOC's, you need to fully licence that machine - at the same level as the SOC's it talks to.

Here are my concerns:
Security. Assuming you got with the all-on-one box model - where are you going put it? On the LAN? Then you need to open ports from the internet onto your LAN - not exacly something your security admin will like doing. If not the LAN, then in the DMZ? How many security admins are gonna let you put your enterprise dbms in the DMZ?? Thus, it would seem to me that for anything other than intranet apps, you're looking at a 2x price bump simply because you need to put the ADF on a separate web server.

In my discussions with ESRI on this, they said that because the ADF now handles the tile cache, it actually off-loads much of the map making work from the SOCs, which means it should carry the same licensing. While it's true that a tile cache saves a lot of work, is true it's not exactly a compelling argument. Creating a tile cache is not magic that can only be done by ESRI. Brian Flood has implemented this in the next version of Arc2Earth (pro edition costs $299). Slap OpenLayers (free) in front of that, and you've got the same thing running for a tiny fraction of the cost. So telling me that I should pony up twice the money for server because of a tile cache is not compelling at all.

So - where are we. If you want to design a system the way you have it running today - you're looking a 3 times the base pricing for server - this will get you ArcSDE running as a service on a separate DBMS (assuming 2 sockets) and the web ADF running on it's own server (also 2 sockets).

Anyhow, I just wanted to post the details as I understand them since ESRI (at this point) has not posted anything related to this, and I know there are a lot of people who are excited about the web ADF, and this is going to come as a big suprise.