Comments on: Talend Uses Open Source and Community to Transform Data Integration

By: Attunity – An Independent Alternative For Data Replication « Merv's Market Strategies for IT Suppliers

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:42:47 +0000

[...] and Oracle and Microsoft (both of whom embed Attunity.) It also has marketing arrangements with Talend, SyncSort, OpenText and Expressor for ETL deals. Attunity has a global sales organization: North [...]

By: Merv Adrian

Merv Adrian — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:06:07 +0000

Nice discussion, Vincent. The pricing approaches of software vendors have helped keep procurement specialists, lawyers, accountants and consultants employed for years. One interesting shortcut when available is to find out the GSA listing for US government pricing and insist on doing at least that well. For DBMSs that have done TPC benchmarks, prices used in the price/performance computations are required to be available to customers as well, or the benchmark must be withdrawn, There are clues everywhere…

By: Vincent McBurney

Vincent McBurney — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:17:08 +0000

Oracle has a global price book and has the one price for its products across every country. This means Oracle products have become very cheap in Australia with the rising dollar! I was so surprised that Oracle offered ODI and Informatica for the same price that I blogged about it: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/infosphere/oracle-bi-gambit-cutting-the-price-of-informatica-by-over-70-30160

IBM has a button on most product pages “view prices and buy”, when I click on the button on the DataStage page it takes me to a list of prices of about 24 DataStage products and addons. I used IBM price books to create the post on the cheapest and most expensive places to buy DataStage: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/infosphere/25184.

You still got to take that DataStage per value unit price and multiply it by your processor/core type which can be complex. Plus different rates for prod and non-prod (and other vendors who don’t charge for non-prod). And some vendors charge for database sources/targets. Some charge for ERP addons. It gets complex. You would never pay list price for IBM software, always haggle.

I don’t think Informatica publishes any prices other than the cloud services, in fact if you google “informatica price” my blog post on the Oracle pricing of Informatica comes up first.

As for Ab Initio – you cannot really compare them to any other vendor. They live in their own world.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:58:05 +0000

Vincent: good point although majority of customers are wise these days. They are listening to guys like Ray Wang.

By the way, did anyone paid attention to what Michael and Yves just did?

By: Yves de Montcheuil

Yves de Montcheuil — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:15:35 +0000

Vincent, if you have links to the price lists of Informatica, Ab Initio, SAP, IBM and Oracle I am very interested… Even if that’s the pre-discount prices!
Showing a higher-than-reality list price and “haggling” with each client would be exactly what we want to avoid – price opacity, customer-specific pricing, etc.

By: Michael Waclawiczek

Michael Waclawiczek — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:30:29 +0000

Vincent, in regards to your question above, we absolutely stick to our list price on our sales.

We haven’t encountered situations yet where a customer felt that our software was overpriced for the value we provide. Usually, the opposite is the case. But I am also open to admit that we have discounted our software in a few situations to close a deal within a given quarter.

On your second point, we do not add product features or bundle services to “sweeten” a deal. Given our usage-based pricing approach, we have chosen to provide all product features including GUI tools, our semantic metadata repository, our parallel data processing engine, and all our connectors as part of a sale. There are no restrictions on the number of connectors or GUI tools a customer can use.

By: Vincent McBurney

Vincent McBurney — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:06:05 +0000

A lot of vendors play a game where they publish a list price but when it comes to talking to customers they do some haggling, some feature bundling, some training and consulting add ons and come up with a custom price. Marquee customers can often get very deep discounts. So my question to Talend – why don’t you just show a high list price and then haggle with customers to make it more attractive? My question to Expressor – do you stick to your list price on all your sales? Are you as transparent as you make out to be?

By: Jerome Pineau

Jerome Pineau — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:50:07 +0000

I’m not intimate enough with OSS pricing models to jump in here but it does occur to me that while OSS and proprietary vendors beat each other up about who’s pricing is more open and/or less complicated to figure out, the big winners on that front are SaaS on-demand players with a monthly per seat costing structure – At least those are straightforward and easy to calculate.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:44:11 +0000

Such an arrogance could be a bad thing for a young company that just starts to discover itself

By: Yves de Montcheuil

Yves de Montcheuil — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41:59 +0000

Michael, I am glad for you that you can sell DI software like cars. I just hope that your pricing is more “real” than the one of car vendors. Who pays sticker price for a car nowadays?

As they say, don’t feed the trolls… so I won’t. If you want to take on the commercial open source model, that has proven highly successful for companies such as MySQL, SugarCRM, Jaspersoft, Alfresco, Pentaho, Talend, and many others – be my guest. Users know where the value is.