Licensing a CRM 4.0 Deployment

CRM 4.0 requires a variety of other Microsoft products and technologies, many of which add to the overall software licensing costs for a CRM deployment. Total software licensing costs will depend on the CRM 4.0 product edition deployed, the number of CRM client licenses purchased, and how the product is deployed. In this hypothetical example, we assume that 100 employees require access to CRM, the CRM application must be accessible to employees from over the Internet, and select partners need to be given access to various CRM reports and other data through a SharePoint Server 2007 portal. Full retail prices are quoted below; organizations can receive discounts of up to 40% depending on their overall volume of Microsoft purchases.

The components needed to deploy CRM and make it accessible to intranet users are pictured in the upper half of the illustration, labeled Corporate Intranet. To be properly licensed, the organization purchases a single CRM 4.0 Professional Server license (US$1,999) and 100 full CRM CALs (US$99,900 total). The intranet CRM server in the example runs on Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (US$800).