Tag: Licensing
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Changing the Pricing Model
How does a company decrease the price of an enterprise product or service? I have written a few pieces on licensing enterprise software; Licensing Roundup might be useful background for this piece. A public company (and most private companies) can’t down sell their existing customers. That means they can’t reduce…
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Competing with the Microsoft Bundle
Something must be done! Here’s something… The vast majority of my career has been in competition with Microsoft’s bundled solutions. I do not think that you win by doing what they do, but more expensively. And yet, this happened. When Microsoft really comes at you, they do it with EEE:…
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Licensing Roundup
I’ve written a number of articles now about licensing software: here’s a guide through them. Since I wrote these, usage-based pricing has become an area of interest… I have yet to do my own article, but in the meantime here’s Metronome’s round-up of UBP challenges and opportunities.
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Finding the Price
Let’s dive once more into the licensing breach! Here’s the background: What’s not covered? Well, when I wrote this post about evaluating a side business, it came close to the process for defining the price of a cost-plus service or product. That’s not a particularly hard task in theory: Of…
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Offering Multiple License Models
I’ve written quite a bit about licensing software now, you can start here to follow the whole thread. In The Platform License Problem, I mentioned some free pricing as a hide-the-sausage technique. When there are multiple markets to find product fit for, and the vendor has a software base that…
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The Platform License Problem
In my other three posts about licensing, I discussed simple products. But what about platform companies? A platform company sells two types of products: the platform, which enables everything else, and the use cases which rely on that platform to solve specific problems. The key to the platform company definition is that…
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Licensing models, self-service style
In my other two posts about licensing, I suggested that flat rate pricing is best for customers, but impossible in enterprise sales because of the variable and high costs of making a sale. Those costs are difficult to understand if you haven’t been exposed before, but they are all too…
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Managing the Unmanageable
I’ve been thinking off and on about containers (FKA partitions, zones, jails, virtualized apps) and mobile ecosystems for a few years. These technologies have gone through several iterations, and different implementations have different goals, but there is an overlap in the currently extant and growing versions. Hold containers, IOS/Android, and…
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Product Sales Metrics
So you’ve launched a product… Is the product selling? How’s ASP (Average Sales Price) after discounting, and is the discount larger than you expected? Deal size? Cost of sales? Are there measurable predictors for lost opportunities exiting the pipeline at each stage? Are there ways to accelerate the wins through…
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Multi-tenancy in platforms
If you’ve built a monolithic enterprise product, it is not sensible to convert it to multi-tenancy. You can sell a managed service provider (MSP), but you’re not going to get to software as a service (SaaS). Often no one wants to discuss reasoning at all, because the need to convert…
