ArcGIS Pro Concurrent licensing retiring

[GISWT]

We are hoping to expand the usage and licenses of ArcGIS Pro within our organisation but have been told that we cannot purchase Concurrent licenses as they are being depreciated and our only option is named user. We are a small organisation with only 2 core GIS users and many adhoc users, when they need to use ArcGIS it is for short-term projects and tasks, often with quick turnaround. It is not viable for us to buy licenses for all of these users but having to manually assign licenses as and when a user needs one also creates a major blocker for us in the system (what if the admins are unavailable, which is highly likely).

Has anyone else come up against this issue and been forced down the named user path? How are you managing the situation? I can't find any documentation or Esri communication about this change and can imagine many more companies will have similar difficulties. The only thing I can find is it almost happened in 2016 but in 2017 Esri back tracked because of user discontent.

[SheriNorton]

We're just over the Small Gov ELA (only time great demographic trends are a bummer), so that's not a feasible path. We'll spend the next 11 months really looking at our users needs and try to eval whether to downgrade (or simply eliminate) licenses. This would have been somewhat easier to stomach and fund if the increases had been gradual the past 10-12 years, rather than such an enormous jump at once.

[ZachBodenner]

ESRI has been trying to nudge organizations in this direction for a while now. Up until a few years ago they let you convert concurrent licenses to named users a little bit cheaper but that's no longer offered. It's a pretty disappointing that their stance has always been that concurrent licenses aren't going away if you already have them, only to finally pull the plug without a ton of warning. Their stance is that the simplified user roles mean that products that used to require additional licensure no longer do, but the fact is that the new user roles are so expensive that most of the time it doesn't matter.

[vnixon]

I unfortunately only learned about this imminent deprecation from a Reddit post 2-3 months ago. My plan is to convert as many of our desktop workflows to web gis as possible to reduce the impact of the price increase. I work in a State agency with almost 200 ArcGIS Pro users, 100% on concurrent use licenses. Usage ranges from occasional basic data exploration that may be replaceable with web applications to full-time advanced analysis and development that will continue to require ArcGIS Pro. Luckily we do not need to purchase new licenses this year but we are in a very tight budget year, short-staffed on our central GIS team, and very worried about the following:

•     An estimated tripling of our bill if we were to simply convert our concurrent license users to named licenses
•    The time needed to research potentially dozens of GIS workflows, develop replacement web applications, and train users
•     Feeling like a frog in slowly boiling water and not knowing how quickly the cost of maintaining our concurrent use licenses will increase and when exactly they will be deprecated

[Bud]

This isn't my area of expertise, but are you able to push back and insist that you be grandfathered in since you already have concurrent licensing?

[ZachBodenner]

During conversations with my account manager, I didn't exactly push back, but I did not get the impression it was an option to avoid the new user model.

[LindsayRaabe_FPCWA]

Always ask the question - we've had a few scenarios where things were "not possible" that later have seemed to indeed be possible (with some wrangling). 

[SimonSchütte_ct]

@vnixon "not knowing how quickly the cost of maintaining our concurrent use licenses will increase and when exactly they will be deprecated"

The concurrent use license model is directly linked to ArcMap. It was never possible to buy ArcGIS Pro concurrent use licenses. They were part of the ArcMap license to help the transition to ArcGIS Pro.

If you have perpetual licenses for ArcMap, you can keep using the accompanying ArcGIS Pro license as well. With the End of Life of ArcMap in 2026, maintanance will also end. Therefore, you can continue using the Software in the last version that will be released in 2026. (To my knowledge)

If you want to use the latest ArcGIS Pro version after the end of life date of ArcMap, you need to switch to named user based licenses managed in ArcGIS Online or Enterprise (based on the information available at this point in time). I for example did not hear anything about an maintanance increase for 2025+ or that it even is an option to continue maintanance for concurrent use licenses beyond 2026, but maybe this is region/industry specific. Best discuss the migration strategy with your account manager.


"With the upcoming retirement of ArcGIS Desktop, the ArcGIS named user model will be the only method for licensing ArcGIS. The ArcGIS Pro licensing methods that we knew until now, such as Single Use and Concurrent Use, will be deprecated."
Information source: Esri Spain

[ChelseaRozek]

That's the first I've heard that we would be version locked at the last version of Pro that was available when ArcMap reaches its end of life, or maybe I just didn't understand the ramifications of any previous communication. Whatever the truth is, ESRI definitely needs to make more and clearer communication about what's going to happen.

[DavidBollinger]

  Existing concurrent licenses could fail (ie be unable support latest release of Pro) sooner than 2026.  The "10.1 - 10.8" block of ArcMap concurrent license that also licenses up to latest (currently 3.3) Pro may only go so far, and is the last version of Desktop license that we'll see.  (just as the prior license block for 10.0 only went "so far" (edited, bc version correlation may have been wrong, but those details aren't important))

  For example, upon the release of "Pro 4.0" (could be even earlier, whatever version cut-off they choose) it seems reasonable to expect that ALL former "you get Pro with Desktop" licensing would fail - because there's no more Desktop concurrent licensing AT ALL* as of 7/1/2024 (e.g. don't expect a "Desktop 10.9" license that includes "Pro 4.0").  I get that, we all know Desktop is going away, and has been expected, but they're closing doors on existing licenses in other ways sooner than expected.

  *That also means existing licenses can't be upgraded either - which is how I learned about all of this in the first place, while attempting to upgrade a Desktop+Pro from basic to advanced.  I did literally ask regarding a supposedly "grandfathered" concurrent license, and was told that the ONLY WAY forward was to acquire a Prof+ named license.