Saas Seats

Vinnie Mirchandani has responded to my recent article on his recent article redefine the market for enterprise software.

His comments forced me to go back and reread the original article. Apparently, the feeling of Vinnie on the model of software on the market for enterprise-wide revenues were stronger than I gave them my credit throw-away item at the bottom of my post on Time and materials is an easy option for late-life software.

So let's start over, and I hope we can hear some of you. Cutting through all the theory of market research in my article and his response to my article and my response to his answer, ad nauseam, here are the key issues (not that I expect anyone to respond to all) :

• Do you feel the providers of enterprise software gouging you with this model of one-time charge for licensing rights to use, more subsequent annual fee for maintenance service stamps assistance, and Sometimes the updates?




• Is this the model itself is defective or is this the kind of 22 percent annual fee of 25 percent is too high? Could you live with 15 percent, 10 percent? You name it.




• Do you prefer to pay non-recurring charges and receive guaranteed as with a car? (Do not go into the rathole open source, which I realize could change the whole dynamic.)




• Have you considered third party maintenance, and how to compare?




• At the end of the company's software products life, you've just dropped the maintenance contract and depended on a T & M charge, and how does it work?




• Are you using SaaS, business services such as HR benefits administration, and so on as a way to change the dynamics of maintenance? Or do you use these types of service agreements for other commercial reasons?

Vinnie wrote:

"Most companies reluctant to continue to write checks maintenance for the occasional bug fix (or in the case of many Microsoft patches), and in some cases for future features. But when we measure the cost per patch or support the call connected, he was the toilet seat DoD 640 million look cheap. "

I think most managers and staff to realize that enterprise software is priced "pay now and pay later" for historical reasons and accept it for what it is. For me not to believe, it means that I believe a very dynamic market with hundreds of competitors and millions of customers has been acting irrationally for 35 years. One type of market research would go on board, if that were the case.

Vinnie said that I'm looking back 35 years is a problem. But during this period, the market has looked at many other options noted in the above questions, and it always comes back to this way of paying for functionality of enterprise software. The jury is still out on how SaaS - which is really just service offices timeshare 70s turned into 80s EDI services processed in ASP 90s things change -.

Let me know what you think.