The Year of Choice with CMIS Driving Fairer Enterprise Software Pricing
5. The Year of Choice is Important Again – CMIS becomes the SQL for Content Management
“Choice” has always been a nice word. The headline grabbing price rises of Oracle and SAP and the new lock-in of SharePoint have made customers realize they don’t want to put themselves in a situation where they have no choice in the future. Choice is core to lower prices today and lower prices tomorrow. Geoffrey Moore, a great visionary, a number of years ago predicted the “Stack Wars”. Stack wars tie a customer not just to one product but a whole stack. To reduce the cost of software today you need not just lower cost for the software you are buying but also choice of the lowest cost software stack to run it. This allows you to in the future, if your vendor increases its prices, to switch another vendor. You could for example go from BEA to JBoss, Oracle to MySQL, Windows to Linux or vice versa.
Prediction for 2009: Support for an open stack at the operating system, database and application server levels will be demanded. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) will become the SQL for the content management industry and the catalyst for choice, developing applications once that run on any compliant system with painless switching.
6. The Year of New Enterprise Software Pricing Models
Traditionally enterprise software has been bought with a large upfront payment, followed by a large, typically 20%, annual maintenance renewal. This was driven as a capital expense (cap ex). Discounts for enterprise deals have tempted companies into buying more than they need, creating shelf-ware and rich software companies. This purchasing process is changing, driven by Open Source and Software-as-a-Service pricing models. Customers are now demanding:
- No large upfront fee
- A subscription model
- The ability to budget out of operating expense (Op ex) as opposed to capital expense
- This purchasing process is changing, driven by Open Source and Software-as-a-Service pricing models
Customers are also demanding fair pricing for fair usage highlighting the flaws of traditional pricing:
- Per user pricing – often called Client Access Licenses (CALs)
- No difference in pricing for someone who uses the software for 1 hour a year and someone who uses it 24 hours per day
- A single user paying multiple times to use different software just to access or edit different content formats e.g. Word and CAD files
Prediction for 2009: A move to a subscription model driven out of operating expenditure and a move to fair usage based pricing not CALs.
Follow me on Twitter @drianhowells
Tags: alfresco, choice, CMIS, Content Management, Credit Crunch, documentum alternative, ecm, Open Source, sql, stack, standards
