Re: Seeding the market (was Informix Directions)

There are so many strange things beeing thrown back and forth in this thread I want to comment a little. I'll take one thing now, may be more later: Paul Brown said Informix can sell the Universal Data Option against anyone. It's a great technology and if you find someone with the right need of course you can. If you get to explain it to such customers it's highly likely they would buy. I have been selling products in that way for a long time, and it's realy a good thing to do. It's hard, next to impossible, to build a large company this way however. There is one thing about the UDO I don't understand at all. Why does it carry an extra price? Why isn't it available at the same price as the base DS engines? Crazy Informix people might say. Then we wouldn't earn any extra money on it. But do you now? Lets look at it: You charge $300 extra per seat over the $1000 of DS or 30% Does as much as 10% of your customers by UDO? Probably not (you can't be that low on sales), but lets assume it for the sake of the example: In this case you gain a 3% increase in revenue from the extra price you charge. What's the result of this charge? I as a growing VAR realy want to use UDO. I see a lot of usefullness in the product for my simple traditional bussiness oriented solutions. No fancy data or anything, mostly numbers and characters. I still know I could make a substantially better version of my product and spend less in development if I used the UDO. Why don't I? Simple: I expect to sell a lot of my application. All of a sudden the extra $300 becomes an extra $3.000 and then $30.000 and then $300.000. These goes directly from the bottom line of my company. Even with a better product I couldn't charge that much more. I allready charge a lot, and I do have some competition. In my case, and the case of a lot of other VAR's, the bottom line of my company means the bottom of my own private personal pocket as I own the company. This even means I have to multiply such losses by the not uncommonly 10 or 20 P/E values when it comes to evaluate the value of the company. Another issue is that the UDO doesn't seem to be available with the Work Group edition. That may be wrong, but knowone have told me otherwise, and there is no indication anywhere that it is available. If it isn't I can't sell to a single small customer. Those wouldn't be able to buy a database at $1000 a seat, or even worse $1300. I would loose a significant part of the market. What would happen if you made the UDO available at the same price as the base DS and even had a Work Group edition and of course a Personal Edition at their current prices? You would get a lot of customers to buy it or upgrade to it. You would of course include both the DS and the UDO on each CD so the customer could chose what version to run for themselves in case they got any problems with the UDO. Coustomers would be able to find out what a great product UDO realy is. They would start using it. Now the interesting part starts. As they use it they would be locked into Informix. It would be harder to migrate to any competior. A lot of customers would be very happy with this, as they got the needed advantage in the marketplace from better functionality and less cost of development of their own products. This is for the VAR's. Many inhouse people would also be happy as they could develop at a lower cost and get better solutions to boot. Your gains from all this would be substantially larger than the 3% increase in revenue you now have from UDO (I would guess it's realy more like 0.3%, but that's hardly important). I am at a total loss to understand why Informix doesn't see such simple things. This is but one area where their marketing and sales is in deep trouble. Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com