HCL User Session Licensing for Subscription (Term) Pricing

”User Session” is a unit of measure that applies to HCL Digital Experience (DX) and the HCL Digital Experience Cloud Native offerings. The Digital Experience Cloud Native offerings provide a subscription (Term) pricing model based on consumption of User Sessions and an associated level of virtual processing capacity in production deployments.

 

User Session Definition

 

Digital Experience Cloud Native
(for Digital Experience customers)

Digital Experience license agreements can be found on the HCL Software License Agreements site, Digital Experience category. The following is intended to aid clarity of the metrics defined in the relevant License Information Documents but does not amend or replace the metrics provided therein:

User Session: HCL defines a User Session, for purposes of Digital Experience subscription-based licensing, as the number of web sessions or other online interactions by anonymous or authenticated users to the Program. A User Session is a single instance of continuous interactions with a Program site by an anonymous or authenticated user. A User Session begins when the user authenticates with or visits a Program site and interacts with site pages or components. Interactions can include multiple page views. User Sessions include API calls which deliver Program content or data to customer applications. By default, a User Session ends when the user interaction with the Program site is idle for thirty (30) minutes or until the user ends the interaction explicitly closing their authentication or web page views session with the site. User Sessions are counted per contract year in HCL Digital Experience Programs deployed for Production Use as described below.

Page View means a single view of web page of a Program site. Page views include when a Program web page is loaded or refreshed, an application is loaded, or when content renders or is shown through an opened web page and it triggers activity at the origin service.

Production Use Production Use means used other than in an internal development or test environment (including but not limited to testing, performance tuning, fault diagnosis, internal benchmarking, staging, training, quality assurance activity and/or developing internally used additions or extensions to the DX Program using published application programming interfaces), or backup or archiving.

 

Volt MX
(for Total Experience Customers)

Volt MX license agreements can be found on the HCL Software License Agreements site, Volt MX category and Session is defined therein as:

Session: Session is defined as user interaction with an application either as an interactive session or triggered application logic executed in the background as a non-interactive session. The Session begins when the app is started. It is continued until the app is idle for thirty (30) minutes or until the user ends the app process or operating system explicitly closing the app. The maximum duration for a session is four (4) hours. If an app session continues for four (4) hours, a new session is automatically created.

 

Total Experience

Total Experience license agreements can be found on the HCL Software License Agreements site, Digital Experience category and user session terms are defined therein as:

Licensee is entitled to an equal amount of Digital Experience Cloud Native User Sessions and Volt MX User Sessions as per the licensed tier (e.g., for Tier 1, Licensee is entitled to up to 500k User Sessions of Digital Experience Cloud Native and up to 500k User Sessions of Volt MX.). User Sessions cannot be combined between Digital Experience Cloud Native and Volt MX. Licensee must have sufficient entitlement for the larger usage of Digital Experience Cloud Native and Volt MX. (e.g., a requirement for 600k sessions of Digital Experience Cloud Native and 100k sessions of Volt MX will require a Tier 2 license.)

 

User Session Use Cases in Digital Experience Cloud Native Deployments

What are examples that show how user sessions are recognized and counted inHCL Digital Experience Cloud Native production deployments?

Response: Consider an Employee-facing DX intranet site. In this scenario, an end user employee authenticates to their organization’s corporate intranet (production) DX site at 8:00 AM, and interacts with DX platform components including Practitioner Studio, WCM and DAM authoring tools for two hours to create new content for review. At 10:00 they save the draft and stop actively interacting with DX site pages or applications on the corporate intranet site. At 14:30 they access the DX corporate intranet site and make updates to the content draft until 15:30.

In this scenario, the end user employee has consumed two user sessions; the first from interactions between 8:00 to 10:00 AM, and the second from 14:30 to 15:30.

The following are additional examples of how User Sessions are recognized and counted according to the User Session definition applied to HCL Digital Experience Cloud Native production deployments.

User Session Examples by User Role, and Activity

User Role

DX Cloud Native Production Site

Activity - User Actions

User Session Count #

External user - Non-customer

Program Server 1 - Retail Banking

10:00 AM Visits Program site Personal Banking pages (15 minutes)

12:30 PM Visits Program site, creates online banking account, logs out (35 min)

1 User session

1 User session

External user - Customer

Program Server 1 - Retail Banking

11:00 AM Authenticates to Program site, accesses account

Downloads Mobile (Program) site App (API call), deposits checks, logs out (15 minutes)

1 User session

1 User session (API call)

Internal user - Content author

Program Server 1 - Retail Banking (Authoring)

10:30 AM Authenticates to Program Site (Authoring) creates new Program site page and elements (20 min)

1:30 PM Authenticates to DX Site (authoring), accesses new site page, adds content (15 min)

1 User session

1 User session

Internal user - Employee

Program Server - Employee Communications

7:30 AM Authenticates to Program site, reviews site pages latest corporation press releases (10 min)

9:00 AM Authenticates to Program site, updates address in HR employee record (5 min)

1 User session

1 User session

Internal user - Admin

Program Server 2 - Employee Communications

8:20 AM Authenticates to Program site, configures new page, settings and access levels for a new Program site application (45 min)

1 User session

Internal user - Developer

Program Server 2 – Employee Communications – (Local Development )

2:30 PM Installs Program software to local machine, creates new Program site theme (120 min)

4:30 PM Authenticates to Program site, syncs local theme to Program Server 2 (10 min)

0 User sessions

1 User session

Also reference the HCL DX Help Center, topic: How to monitor user-session consumption for HCL DX Cloud Native v9.5 production deployments

 

Measuring User Session Consumption in Digital Experience sites

In DX web sites, User Sessions are identified through appropriate tags using the appropriate scripts for each site page view request. HCL Digital Experience pre-defines analytics metadata tags for use in DX site pages. These can be integrated for monitoringto track the number of User Sessions consumed in DX sites for specified time periods with a variety of web analytics tools and services. For reference, see the HCL Digital Experience documentation topic: Analyzing user behavior by Active Site Analytics. An example of this integration, use with Google Analytics, can be found in this topic: Integrating Google Analytics 4 with HCL Digital Experience. In addition, HCL DX provides built-in user session tracking for customers that have deployed HCL Digital Experience to supported Kubernetes platforms. For reference, see the HCL Digital Experience documentation topic Tracking user session consumption and exporting usage reports. During Q3 2024, this capability will also be provided for HCL DX Supported On Premises platforms.

 

Getting Started: Moving from Processor Value Unit Pricing to DX User Session Subscription Pricing

To prepare to transition to the Digital Experience Cloud Native User Session subscription pricing model, customers should gather the following information:

  1. How many User Sessions are consumed on your production DX deployments in a 12-month period? Do you have a forecast for % growth in User Session traffic each year?
  2. What are the platform/ hardware capacity levels supporting your DX production deployments to On-Premises and Container platforms? References:
    1. User Session and Kubernetes deployment Virtual Processor Core Conversion Table
    2. User Session and Specified On Premises platform deployment Virtual Processor Core Conversion Table published in the HCL Digital Experience Cloud Native 9.5.x License Information document.
    3. Architecture Overview: Digital Experience Container and Traditional deployments published in the HCL DX Help Center documentation
  3. What are theplatform capacity levels supporting your non-Production DX environments, e.g. development, test, authoring and staging environments?
  4. Do you have other DX projects in plan or other websites/digital properties that may benefit from the term subscription model and unlimited server deployment capacity?

Contact us to discuss your requirements. HCL Digital Experience Cloud Native term pricing provides a simple, scalable and transparent model that helps customers to choose the best fit and grow as their business demands and digital strategy evolves. Our HCLSoftware and Business Partner account managers are here to help.

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