① Guides · Rocket terminal emulation
Terminal emulation is the one mainframe access product priced by the seat, not the machine. Rocket Software has folded BlueZone, Passport, RUMBA and three others into a single offering, and the renewal turns on a number most estates have never reconciled: how many of those seats belong to people who still use them.
Priced by the seat.
Rocket Software's terminal emulator, formerly BlueZone, came from the 2006 Seagull Software acquisition, and Rocket later picked up RUMBA, HostExplorer, EXTRA! and Reflection along the way, several of them through the Micro Focus heritage. In early 2025 Rocket consolidated that collection under Rocket Secure Host Access, a single security first emulation product. If your estate grew by acquisition, you may be running two or three of these emulators side by side under separate paper.
Unlike Adabas or a scheduler, emulation is licensed per seat or per named user, usually as a subscription with annual maintenance. The cost driver is the entitlement count, not your MSU. And entitlement counts behave in one direction: they go up when people are onboarded and almost never come down when people leave, change roles, or stop using green screen access. The result is that most estates renew on a seat count that describes the organization they were several years ago, not the one using the product today.
Reconcile entitlements against active named users before the renewal opens. Departures, role changes and over provisioning create a gap on almost every estate, and it is usually larger than anyone expects. This number requires no migration and is frequently the single biggest saving on the deal.
List every emulator in use, BlueZone, Passport, RUMBA, HostExplorer, EXTRA!, Reflection, and the contract behind each. Consolidation onto Rocket Secure Host Access is coming whether you drive it or the vendor does. Driving it yourself turns a forced migration into a negotiation event where the combined entitlement is recounted and right sized.
A consolidation is the moment a vendor commonly tries to shift the licensing metric, per seat to per device, named to concurrent, or into a new bundle. Some changes help you, some do not. Model the renewal under the proposed metric against your real usage before agreeing, because a favorable rate on an unfavorable metric is not a saving.
Emulation is a competitive category with several established vendors and some open source options, and the product lives on the desktop rather than in the application core, so switching cost is genuinely lower than for a database or scheduler. Cost the migration properly. You may never run it, but a priced exit is what makes a seat based renewal negotiable.
Seat counts should be allowed to fall. Negotiate the right to reduce entitlements at defined points, cap any per seat uplift, and set the renewal baseline to the reconciled count rather than the historical one. Without a true down right, every seat you ever provisioned stays in the bill regardless of who is still using it.
What changes with us in the room.
A seat based renewal looks simpler than an MSU negotiation, and that is the trap: simplicity makes it easy to renew on last year's count without asking the only question that matters. Across 500+ engagements and $180M+ of negotiated mainframe spend, the pattern on per user products is consistent. The reconciled count plus a credible alternative resets the deal; the autopilot renewal carries every phantom seat into the next term.
What you get
Typically per seat or per user rather than on mainframe capacity, often as a subscription with annual maintenance. The cost driver is the number of entitlements you hold, not your MSU. That makes the renewal a count problem: most estates pay for far more seats than they have active users, because counts grow with onboarding and almost never shrink.
Rocket brought BlueZone, Passport, RUMBA, HostExplorer, EXTRA! and Reflection together under Rocket Secure Host Access. For buyers running a mix from past acquisitions, that is both a risk, if it is used to push a single new metric and uplift, and a lever, because standardizing onto one product is a negotiation event where entitlements can be recounted and right sized.
Yes. Emulation is a competitive category with several established vendors and some open source options, and switching cost is lower than for a database or scheduler because the product sits on the desktop, not in the application core. That makes the alternative genuinely priceable, which is what gives a seat based renewal real leverage.
A true user count. Reconcile entitlements against active named users before the renewal, and most estates find a material gap from departures, role changes and over provisioning. Right sizing the seat count to real usage is frequently the single largest line, and it requires no migration at all.
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