Byrne Tony Byrne

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Vendor pricing continues to evolve

27-Oct-2006

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Web Content and Experience Management, Building Business Case, Marketplace at Large

Database and application server vendors like IBM and Oracle have been struggling recently to deal with traditional, processor-based licensing models in a world with ever-faster clock speeds and multicore processors. Records management association ARMA recently summarized the issue. It's been interesting to watch the evolution of software models in the content technology space over the past 6 years. First there was a trend towards seat licenses (inherited from the document management industry), but that tied vendor revenue to user adoption....which has rarely been good. After what seemed to be something of a renewed emphasis on processor-based licenses, the advent of super-fast servers now has some CMS and Portal vendors adding different factors into the pricing mix, including "sites," "implementations," and -- borrowing a page from the hosted services -- even repository size. As vendors get more creative across all tiers of the market, you need to be prepared to pull out your old calculator when it comes time to comparing bids.

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