Ceriel Jacobs wrote:
Op 25 feb 2010, om 06:51 heeft Kingsley Idehen het volgende geschreven:
Ceriel Jacobs wrote:
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:01:42 -0500 Kingsley Idehen wrote:
Anyway, lets discuss as I am very open to thoughts from the community re. this
important matter.
In our situation we would prefer to trade some workstation cores for
connections.
Instead of 8 cores with 10 connections, 2 cores with 40 connections.
Okay, will think about it relative to the new special offer pricing.
For your information, we are in the very "grey" zone of rather small SMB
companies. The workstations over here we intend to run virtuoso on, currently have no
more than 2 cores and a total of 3.3GB of addressable RAM memory. Within a few years that
might be 4 cores and 4 or 8GB of memory, no more. These machines are relative small.
For starters, special or standard pricing, I believe you fall into the
Desktop Operating system realm and threshold for processor cores is 8;
thus, no incremental charges by processor cores.
Threads is still something vague to a non-developer.
These are basically the database session channels.
On such a relative complex product as Virtuoso even to me it is (1) not clear
what/how will be limited and (2) which number of connections are necessary in a
web-connected environment. The fact/feeling I don't like is that webapp users
might need to wait due to license limits. I can better live with hardware bound
restrictions.
You have to look at this kind of technology like a motorway or highway.
The number of lanes affect the probability of congestion. The lower the
congestion the higher the benefits to everyone in the "goods and
services" economy :-)
For us, monetization is simply a function of "opportunity cost" etc.. We
don't price anything just because we can, its all about production costs
(our side) and opportunity costs alleviation (customer side).
The kind of conversation we are having right now is how both parties
deal with calibration of the items above.
That is why I would like to offer another consideration to simplify and offer
"fair" licensing for non-technical users. This could be licenses based on the
number of RAM memory that can be consumed by virtuoso. RAM is easy to understand and easy
to enforce(?). This might include a processor core number limit.
Yes, this is certainly being considered, and even internally, the are
very strong echoes re. the perception of "fairness" etc..
For instance let's say on a workstation type OS, with 2GB or RAM, and a 2 core
processor, machine. Could that be (just a starting point, don't be angry)... $
49? Now you might think, I don't wan't to sell such tiny volumes. Sell them
bundled: 10 x 2GB/2core license: $ 490,-
It would be truly great if later on, multiple licenses can still be installed
on a single running instance. Call it 'license partitioning'.
Adding a 2GB/2core pack to an existing 2GB/2core pack would let the user extend
his running virtuoso instance to (user can choose to prefer for maximization of
RAM or processor cores): '4GB @ 2 cores' or '2GB @ 4 cores'. Three packs would
be: '6GB @ 2 cores', '2GB @ 6 cores' or '3GB @ 4 cores' (when the machine has
no more than 4 cores available). So the small user is able to mix and match.
Very nice idea as per my comments above, a very very strong candidate
suggestion re. pricing, thanks!!
Kingsley
How would other "grey users" value such a licensing scheme?
Best regards,
~Ceriel
PS the credit card payments only at or below $ 500 line at the bottom of page
[1] raises eyebrows, as there is no product offered below or at $ 500 (USD 499
+25% maintenance)
[1] http://www.openlinksw.com/virtuoso/sales/vpricing2.htm
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
