I have to say that I am in a similar boat. I work for an organization that spends a lot of money every year on different applications. Everything from spending roughly 250K on virtual load / performance testing systems to spending over 1 Million a day on high priced consultants to get a CRM up and running without it going down every time you send an email out to a small portion of your eventual userbase, asking them to attempt to login.
There are opensource versions of everything available - but to large corporations the questions are usually the same; "What are the results of the Dunn and Bradstreet vendor evaluations", "What level of support is offered and what fixes will they provide to us", "What is the 5 year projection for the product and the company" - just to name a few. It is easy to make a knee jerk reaction, if the price goes up, and say that you should start developing in XAML or Lazslo, but if you are trying to create feature rich internet applications on a large scale - and you already employ numerous Flash Designers, Java Developers and other misc. developers - paying them on average 100K, you will start to see what I mean here when I say that the initial investment in a server side product of this nature is a drop in the bucket. My thought is that very few people on this list are actually making the purchasing decisions for their enterprise. I try to look at Flex as a corporate initiative, instead of the right answer for a small project. Even if you are showing an ROI of over 5Mil a year - there are always other projects that you can apply Flex to, that will make the senior leadership team at your company smile. I have said from the beginning that a Flex install should run my company roughly 100K, and will not be afraid to tell my Managers that the price is now 130-150. Let's see what happens - and understand that for most of us the price change will not affect us directly. That is, of course, unless MM releases a Flex Lite with a price tag closer to that of CF Server. We shall see. Jeff http://www.flexauthority.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dennis Jackson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <flexcoders@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 5:09 PM Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Flex 1.5 price > > We have a similar situation in that we have plenty of cash for investment, certainly more than some of the companies I have worked with in the past. The license is a small cost compared to the labor that goes into the projects. We also need to factor intraining and support and the like. I think the biggest gain with flex is the ability to have a very maliable interface that is designed to work over a service oriented architecture. > > However, I have a learning curve regardless of the platform I choose. I have comparable labor if I use comparable approaches architecture wise. > > If I use quad processor boxes (I do), and if I have at least 3 zones per production site (I do, dev stg and production) plus local developer installs then I am looking at with current list prices, at least 4 licenses totalling 48,000 per production stream. > That doesn't include a 12-30k list range for the CFMX licenses we are using for the middle tier cfc layer. > > So I am left with the question, do I get an additional 48k of value going with Flex on top of my webservice architecture, versus the open source lazslo. And additionally do I get an additional 78k of value from flex of cfmx over using laszlo on bluedragon (with flashORB)? > > Then the longer term question is, given the dearth of junior and mid level CF talent do I embark on a migration to J2EE or .NET? Where will the talent levels for Flex and Laszlo be in 2 or 3 years? > > It is a tough question, but I can tell you this asp.net is free and pre installed, and I know it was hard to say let's spend more money to buy something that does the same function. And that was below the 10k local sign off limit. Above 10k all purchases need business cases ROI and have to be signed off at a MUCH higher level ( our NY divisional HQ) > > An increase from 12 to 20 would make those decisions easier in a lot of ways. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Scott Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:47:32 > To:flexcoders@yahoogroups.com > Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Flex 1.5 price > > hehhehe funny, how we all suddnely commence a mass exodus. > > I won't comment on the price whether its rumour or not, but what I > will comment is why I think either way it won't make that much of a > difference (well its totally not my own opinion) > > At present in my company FLEX price tag was never a contention it was > more about how will i get it into the business with minimal > fuss/training required. > > If we were to pay $15k per CPU, then so be it. Most software we > purchase thats tailored to an enterprise level is more then that - > infact the intranet software we bought was higher in price and oh my, > is it useless. > > The major selling point for us was how much $ would it take for > someone to create what FLEX has on offer via DHTML or other > technology - too much. > > FLEX is also a hard sell inside businesses. I know here in Australia > the local Sales guys really have to put in the hard yards to get the > sale made, and the end sale wasn't really worth the time and money > invested (flights back and forth etc). > > I know, why not sell it much cheaper then? well again it would still > require the same amount of sale - hand holding - to get over the line > and at a lower price - furthermore it would have a larger takeup, > which means sales folks will tied up with a lot of tyre kickers > instead of real potential meaty customers. On top of this, if it was > sold at $5k per CPU or something like that, there would be a lot of > support required which in turn eats into profit margins for the > product - recoup investments already outlayed. So in reality for a > company thats publically listed and has a bunch of folk who demand > profit margins, kinda damned if you do, damned if you don't. > > I am thankful that I have a company who is loaded with $$ so i can > play with FLEX, but the future of FLEX is going to ramp up radically > and so i can see pass the price tag and consider it a wise investment. > > > > > -- > Regards, > Scott Barnes > http://www.mossyblog.com > http://www.flexcoder.com (Coming Soon) > > Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT > > Yahoo! Groups Links > To visit your group on the web, go to: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. > Sent via BlackBerry - a service from AT&T Wireless. > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
