Alex Balashov wrote: > Understood. Thanks for the clarification. I did not personally intend > to participate in any sort of festivity compelling you to disclose or > commit to any pricing; as a vendor with an enterprise pricing model, > you presumably engage in some degree of market segmentation and > bargaining that could have a nontrivial pricing impact. That's between > you and your customers. > > I'm not an ITSP, so I have little use for Enswitch personally, but it > helps to know the ballpark figures when recommending that my customers > look into it, as I sometimes do. > > In general, I do not think your pricing is unreasonable relative to the > value derived from it as a core technology. It compares favourably to > most of the midrange convergent platform vendors (Metaswitch, Broadsoft, > etc.), with the proviso of lacking actual interconnected telco-oriented > features ((C)SS7 ISUP/TCAP, MGCP and/or H.248/MEGACO, etc.), which is > something that we acknowledged in another thread to be intermediately > useful but of diminishing long-term importance, especially relative to > the CAPEX involved in trying to implement it, assuming it's even > possible to do. > > This list consists in large part of an audience to which at least one of > the following applies: > > (1) Third World countries and accompanying price levels; > > (2) Fly-by-night "suits" deluded by the discovery of Asterisk, etc. > into the belief that everything telecommunications-related should > be open-source, free, and deployable in under 10 minutes; > > (3) Accustomed to making do with substandard, discounted crapola > developed using offshore methodologies, which are often - though > not always - a true case of "you get what you pay for." > > (4) Highly capable engineering organisation with good developers > who can rapidly prototype; accustomed to doing business that > way, building anything needed in-house (however minimalistic > and duct-taped together), and being bewildered at actually > spending cash to save time. > > Many of these people will display belligerence and hostility toward your > pricing model because they don't understand the value proposition, nor > have a reference frame for those kinds of costs. They also do not > understand the economics of vendor support, professional services, > scalability, etc. > > If I were paying several thousand dollars a quarter - at a minimum - to > use Enswitch, I would have fairly high expectations, and from what I > understand, your company can and does deliver on them.
Alex, I agree with all of this, and your comments are very fair. We don't do formal market segmentation, just a sliding scale according to concurrent calls (and features on larger systems), and our price structure has had only minor tweaking in the last two years. Alistair Cunningham +1 888 468 3111 +44 20 799 39 799 http://integrics.com/ _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
