Salesforce fine-tunes 'per drink' pricing for developers
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Enhancements to Eclipse-based integrated development environment are designed to bring traditional source code and testing tools to hosted Force.com platform.
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Among the factors sited: the ability to customize the software and avoid vendor lock-in.
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The Story: Look in the mirror, Mr. or Ms. IT buyer. You?ve got more muscle than ever ? and you did it without steroids.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Despite the wave of consolidation sweeping the industry, buyers have actually gained more leverage than ever when it comes to making deals with their vendors, notes a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis. ?Software buyers need to realize that the pendulum is beginning to swing in their favor and that there are an increasing number of alternatives in today?s software market,? concurs Gartner analyst William Snyder (no relation to this writer).There are a lot of reasons for the swing, but one certainly stands out: The shift to SaaS (software as a service). The poster child for this phenomenon is Salesforce.com. "Both its development and delivery models are having a disruptive effect on the entire CRM market,? notes Forrester Research analyst Bill Band. But it?s not just Salesforce: By 2011, Snyder says, fully 25 percent of all new business software will be delivered as a service as Salesforce and other vendors push upstream from the small-business market. Already, SaaS providers make up the majority of sales for several segments of human resources applications, and is well-established for supply-chain management.[ InfoClipzflash video primer: Software as a Service ]SaaS is just the first wave of services that are pushing pricing power over to buyers: The more recent move to Web services and the beginnings of SOA (service-oriented architecture) deployment are encouraging the use of modular software, which in turn cuts development costs, makes it harder for vendors to sell expensive suites, and lessens the need for expensive consulting services.And yet another factor is upping buyer?s power, notes Gartner?s Snyder: the emergence of third-party support options that are reducing software?s TCO (total cost of ownership). ?Maintenance services have been a quasi-monopoly for software vendors,? he said. ?For many years, only the software vendor had rights to the source code of the critical components of the system. This made it impossible to go to an open, competitive market to obtain upgrades, services and support, which in turn made it impossible to negotiate maintenance fees.?Interestingly another software trend ? the growth of virtualization ? is beginning to affect pricing for hardware, particularly servers. A report by Infiniti Research suggests that server shipments will start declining in 2008: ?The server market of tomorrow will be a value game and not a volume game.? And that means better pricing for hardware, too.Don?t let your head swell too much, but Gartner vice president Mark McDonald credits ?savvy CIOs? for containing costs that were once out of control. ?They?re saying, ?I want you to implement in a way that gives me the advantage over my competition? ? and they?re not accepting the traditional vendor model, which favors homogeneity and the economics of scale.?The Bottom Line: Chances are that you?re looking at SaaS, Web services, SOA, virtualization, open source, and other technology-delivery methods for a variety of specific reasons, without realizing the cumulative effect is to give you more pricing power. Now that you?ve got the power, use it.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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The software maker has filed a claim over its per-employee pricing plan, highlighting the tech industry's increasing focus on patents, News.com has learned.
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New Salesforce.com hosted CRM lets users access Apex Code to make writing custom apps easier, adds workflow management.
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Can you handle Dylan and the Devsters? The barrel-scraping netherworld of corporate anthems is agog at Salesforce.com's groundbreaking new hip-hop opus, "Dev Life".â¦
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Business & money: Troubled coffee chain Starbucks going back to basics by testing a cut-price brew costing only $1
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People who buy bottles of Honest Tea have sometimes been moved to offer its manufacturer a lot more than $1.49.
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General purpose system utility Cocktail has been update adding support for Mac OS X 10.5.2, among other changes.
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UK brewer Scottish & Newcastle, warns of "substantial price increases" to offset rising costs.
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Computer Associates will offer an on-demand pricing model for many of its mainframe applications. The licensing program uses what CA calls &quot;measured-workload pricing&quot; based on actual system
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft continues to prepare for the third-quarter launch of itsÂ Dynamics Live CRM serviceÂ with Tuesday's announcement of initial pricing and product information. Customers in North America will be able to begin using the service free under an early access program this year and Microsoft expects to start charging for the hosted CRM (customer relationship management) service in the first half of 2008, according to Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The software giant made the announcements at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Denver. At the same conference a year ago in Boston, Microsoft CEOÂ Steve Ballmer confirmedÂ Dynamics Live CRM would be the vendor's third major Live hosted service, following on from its Windows Live and Office Live software-as-a-service (SAAS) offerings. Live CRM is one of three deployment options in Microsoft's upcoming "Titan" release of its CRM software. Titan will be the first Microsoft CRM release based on a multi-tenant architecture, using a single code base to support three types of usage -- Live CRM, an on-premise version of the CRM application and a partner-hosted release. All three deployment options share a common code base. The on-premise and partner-hosted versions of Titan should appear in the fourth quarter of this year, Wilson said. The company has yet to commit to a launch date for Dynamics Live CRM outside of the U.S. and Canada, but does intend to offer the service internationally, Wilson said. Microsoft's partners have already been hosting Dynamics CRM and Wilson stressed that the customer early access program for Live CRM will be partner-led meaning that would-be users have to go through partners to sign up for the service. Microsoft will also compensate partners annually for the customers they sign up for Live CRM. Each year, such partners will receive 10 percent of the annual SAAS subscription revenue per customer. For next year, Microsoft will offer an additional sweetener to partners increasing it to 15 percent. Microsoft plans to provide a number of different versions of Live CRM. Dynamics Live CRM Professional, aimed at companies with five or more CRM users, will be the first to become available, Wilson said. Professional is the service Microsoft will offer in its free early customer access program this year. In 2008, Professional will cost $39 per user per month in a promotional price, which will eventually be raised to $44 per user per month. The service will enable users to access CRM capabilities through Microsoft Outlook and browser clients and will include customizable workflow based on Windows Workflow Foundation. The other Live CRM release Microsoft intends to begin offering in the first half of next year is its Enterprise version, which adds in offline data synchronization on top of the Professional features. Dynamics Live CRM Enterprise will cost $59 per user per month. "The decision to allow early access to CRM Live for no fee is a pragmatic approach to attracting Microsoft-oriented prospects who have been looking for commodity sales-force automation functionality but have as of yet sat it out," Michael Maoz, vice president at market research company Gartner, wrote in an e-mail comment. "We don't expect Microsoft CRM Live will be generally available to customers until the first quarter of 2008 at the earliest, and then for North American clients only, with subsequent waves for EMEA AsiaPac." Microsoft's initial focus with CRM Live will be sales-force automation for business-to-business organizations, Maoz said, not customer service in the contact center, Web self-service or field service. Until Microsoft releases a full list of functionality for the service and how much customization of the product it will allow, customers will find it to hard to do "an apples-to-apples comparison" of Live CRM versus existing on-demand CRM from the likes of Salesforce.com and NetSuite, he added. Salesforce.com's Group Edition might be the likely rival to CRM Live and a sight cheaper than Microsoft's offering at $10 per user. "Salesforce.com is better focused from a sales and marketing perspective, selling directly and through its growing third-party partners, giving them a strong head start in the market that will be hard for Microsoft to compete with given its current go-to-market strategy, especially its dependence on partners to deliver a hosted solution in addition to the SAAS model -- the hosted offering has only a slight chance of succeeding over the next 18 months," Maoz wrote. REFERENCES:, Mar. 14, 2007Microsoft widens partner access to next CRM release, Jan. 10, 2007Microsoft to take Dynamics CRM Live in Q2 2007, Jul. 11, 2006
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In what&#39;s being called a shrewd licensing move, Microsoft last week put its competitors on the defensive and avoided price increases for customers by announcing it would not charge extra fees for server software running on dual-core, processor-based
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An antidote to through-the-roof pricing A tiny open source company is lining up to become the latest roadblock to database vendors happily charging enterprises fat software licenses.â¦
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Goes for small biz biz Microsoft is banking on a pay by the month charging scheme to pull small businesses onto its customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.â¦
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As mentioned in this new post from Chris Shiflett, an announcement was made at the most recent Columbia PHP meetup by Andrew van der Stock (of OWASP) about an incentive to work in their Spring of Code 2007 competition - a bit of financial reward.   The Spring of Code 2007, an effort that will distribute $100,000 to worthy projects, is divided approximately as follows:  $20,000 for one lucky project. $10,000 for 10 open source projects. $40,000 for 8 large projects. $22,500 for 9 medium projects. $7,500 for an internship.    Chris notes that the projects should be related somehow to web application security and interest was shown in helping out with the security issues that surround PHP (both the language and developing applications in it).
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Google announced new pricing for its Postini hosted e-mail security and compliance management package on Tuesday in hopes of pushing more customers to consider a move to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering.Since adding expanded message filtering, encryption, and archiving tools to Postini's traditional anti-spam services in Oct. 2007 -- and parceling the same features into its Google Apps Premier hosted productivity suite -- the company has been able to convince a significant number of customers to begin working with the SaaS applications, according to Scott Petry, founder and CTO of Postini, which Google acquired for $625 million last July.However, in a move to make the tools more attractive for use in heterogeneous IT environments, and to encourage both enterprise and smaller customers to consider the offering as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise technologies, the company has revamped the product packaging and cut its overall pricing.In addition to pushing pricing for its flagship hosted anti-spam filtering service to $3 per user per year, Google-Postini has moved the price for its hosted virus detection, outbound processing, and content policy management services to $12 per user per year.For its compliance-oriented message data archiving, retention, and e-discovery services, which previously cost $100 per user per year, the firm has drastically cut pricing to $25 per year with the option to extend e-mail archiving at a cost of $10 for every additional 12 months of storage."We've got a healthy number of our existing customers running the newer content management, archiving, and discovery services, but we think that by adjusting pricing, we can get even more people get off their existing infrastructure and get onto managed services offered by Google," Petry said. "We won't be an acquisition that withers and dies; we're focused on expanding our reach and integrating the product line."The combined package of services is meant to compete not only with Postini's traditional rivals, including mail filtering capabilities offered by MessageLabs and Microsoft, but also with security and compliance products marketed by industry stalwarts like Symantec, Petry contends.A customer might have to buy Symantec's standalone anti-spam, anti-virus, messaging security, DLP (data leakage prevention) and policy management technologies to gain the same collection of filtering, archiving, and compliance automation capabilities offered in the Google-Postini SaaS package, according to the executive.By driving down pricing and tying the tools tightly together, Google should be able to convince some large customers to make a shift to SaaS and be able to help smaller companies gain access to tools they may not have been able to afford previously, he said."More than a battle against any of these other guys, this is about getting more companies off of the traditional model of deploying software and appliances to address these problems," Petry said. "We think that time is on our side, and more people than ever are ready to move to thin, in-the-cloud services; we're not trying to get everyone converted overnight, but we have set of technologies to help those who are ready augment their current infrastructure."Google plays up POstini's security benefits As with other security SaaS services, Google-Postini also maintains that its expanding set of message filtering tools can offer customers a unique advantage in terms of protection via the company's ability to see new threats arriving on the networks through its individual users and then leverage intelligence about any emerging threats across its entire client base.In addition to being integrated directly with Google's Apps technologies, Petry also stressed that the company remains dedicated to providing its messaging security services to users of other vendor's e-mail and collaboration infrastructure, including Microsoft's Exchange platform and IBM's Lotus Notes architecture.Some industry watchers may still question the abilities of hosted services providers like Google-Postini to handle complex security tasks such as DLP, but the executive maintains that the SaaS model actually gives his company a major advantage."This is about the democratization of these tools, making them cheaper and allowing more people to use them and protect their investments in existing appliances," he said. "Financial services companies have spent billions trying to do DLP, but now other companies without the same level of internal sophistication or budget can get us for less; we can minimize the amount of hardware necessary for DLP and allow them to use their existing appliances to integrate with us via API."Google-Postini partners said that it may still be early in the game in terms of selling the message filtering, archiving, and discovery tools to enterprises, but they contend that SMB customers should view the pricing move positively.Joe Vaccone, president of Excel Micro -- which resells Google-Postini to other services providers that cater largely to SMBs, said that many customers are both looking for new features to address issues like compliance and to move away from other e-mail filtering vendors who may be getting squeezed from the market."A lot of the older anti-spam vendors are getting clobbered and looking to exit, so I think we might see a lot of companies coming over to Postini because they can get a lot of functionality at a single price point that they may not have been able to obtain before," said Vaccone. "We already see a lot of people looking for new alternatives in this space based on the performance of what they've been using."Vaccone said that Excel Micro's reseller customers are also seeing more of their own clients inquire about Google's Apps platform as licenses to older products, namely Microsoft's Exchange and Office technologies, run out. "We do see some migration to Google Apps going on and believe it will continue," he said.Industry analysts agreed that Google-Postini's revamped pricing and integrated SaaS tools should find favor with SMBs first but said that the work necessary to convince enterprises to buy-in will likely take longer.The Google-Postini marriage carries a lot of credibility in terms of the involved technologies, but large customers will need to be convinced that the company is serious about growing its enterprise footprint, said Rebecca Wettemann, analyst with Nucleus Research."Google-Postini is definitely looking to grow into the enterprise, and spam and e-mail security services like this are ideal for delivery on-demand, but there remains a real challenge for them to gain the trust of enterprises and make them confident that they are a serious player," Wettemann said."The more they can highlight references to existing Postini customers who have moved into the new services, or point to new enterprise customers, the easier it should become," she said. "But they need to show how these innovations they claim deliver value, that it's more than Google throwing cash at some interesting technologies."