Re: Informix beats Oracle

> 8-Cost. You don't need to keep talking to the IBM salesperson. Most of the > features are already included. In fact I'd say IBM could do a lot better > trying to cross-sell to Informix customers... That's an intersting spin on things. The flip side of the all-inclusive pricing is that it is very difficult to demonstrate value for money to customers who only want a subset of inclusive features. For example, if I want to use Informix but am not interested in HDR, ER, parallel backups etc etc, and I have tin that precludes WorkGroup, it's a very difficult task indeed to persuade a customer that '34.5k per core is good value when, for example, Oracle's headline pricing without optional extras is so much cheaper, and I don't want the extras. So for the bigger deals, far from creating a simple sales process, what invariably happens is that the IBM salesman, who has no authority to discount on his or her own, invokes IBM's competitive bid process, which actually slows down the sales cycle as endless levels of authority are sought, bids are rejected and re-cast etc etc. Having attended a Cheetah Launch recently, and seen the proposed pricing presentation for Cheetah, I suspect you'll find IBM moving away from the "all features included" pricing model to one closer to that of Oracle, with its purchasable options, in order to be more competitive.

Captain Pedantic wrote: >> 8-Cost. You don't need to keep talking to the IBM salesperson. Most of the >> features are already included. In fact I'd say IBM could do a lot better >> trying to cross-sell to Informix customers... > > That's an intersting spin on things. I was thinking about selling other products (Websphere, Rational and Tivoli portfolio). I was also thinking about the situations where well... "it works, but you have to buy this other wonderful product". Not completely sure, but to have O authenticate in an LDAP, you have to buy OID... But you have a point... > The flip side of the all-inclusive pricing is that it is very difficult to > demonstrate value for money to customers who only want a subset of inclusive > features. For example, if I want to use Informix but am not interested in > HDR, ER, parallel backups etc etc, and I have tin that precludes WorkGroup, > it's a very difficult task indeed to persuade a customer that '34.5k per Yes. There are cases where this will happen. I'd say this will happen with any vendor and product. The other direction is turning the price model into a nightmare... which in turn will harm the sales cycle. But this all in one in Informix many times means you get a lot of improvements and new features in new versions without increasing the price. You can do more, and/or better with the same cost. This increases the purposed value of the product. Nevertheless, all this rhetoric means nothing if you consider that there are free (both as in beer and as in freedom) databases that can suite many of todays simpler needs. If I was so simplistic as other posters here, I could say that if they give it away for free (as in beer), it's because the market wouldn't pay anything for it. But I believe there is more to it :) > Having attended a Cheetah Launch recently, and seen the proposed pricing > presentation for Cheetah, I suspect you'll find IBM moving away from the > "all features included" pricing model to one closer to that of Oracle, with > its purchasable options, in order to be more competitive. The product announcement is available on IIUG. I've just browse it very quickly and apparently there are a few things that can be sold separately... But it doesn't seem to be a big change. -- Fernando Nunes Portugal http://informix-technology.blogspot.com My email works... but I don't check it frequently...