Re: [asterisk-biz] Integrics releases Enswitch 3.0

Alistair Cunningham wrote:
> Alex Balashov wrote:
>> Alistair Cunningham wrote:
>>> Michael Schwartzman wrote:
>>>> yeah yeah yeah... pay me $65k for every 3 month minimum to use your switch
>>> Michael,
>>>
>>> The minimum price for an Enswitch system is $3300 per quarter, not $65000.
>> I imagine he probably means, "$65k assuming any nontrivial quantity of
>> nodes and/or ports."
>
> Alex,
>
> $65000 per quarter will buy you somewhere in the region of 10000 to
> 25000 concurrent calls (and unlimited users), depending on the features
> you want. I'd be very happy to discuss specifics off-list with you,
> Michael, or anyone else.

Understood. Thanks for the clarification. I did not personally intend
to participate in any sort of festivity compelling you to disclose or
commit to any pricing; as a vendor with an enterprise pricing model,
you presumably engage in some degree of market segmentation and
bargaining that could have a nontrivial pricing impact. That's between
you and your customers.

I'm not an ITSP, so I have little use for Enswitch personally, but it
helps to know the ballpark figures when recommending that my customers
look into it, as I sometimes do.

In general, I do not think your pricing is unreasonable relative to the
value derived from it as a core technology. It compares favourably to
most of the midrange convergent platform vendors (Metaswitch, Broadsoft,
etc.), with the proviso of lacking actual interconnected telco-oriented
features ((C)SS7 ISUP/TCAP, MGCP and/or H.248/MEGACO, etc.), which is
something that we acknowledged in another thread to be intermediately
useful but of diminishing long-term importance, especially relative to
the CAPEX involved in trying to implement it, assuming it's even
possible to do.

This list consists in large part of an audience to which at least one of
the following applies:

(1) Third World countries and accompanying price levels;

(2) Fly-by-night "suits" deluded by the discovery of Asterisk, etc.
into the belief that everything telecommunications-related should
be open-source, free, and deployable in under 10 minutes;

(3) Accustomed to making do with substandard, discounted crapola
developed using offshore methodologies, which are often - though
not always - a true case of "you get what you pay for."

(4) Highly capable engineering organisation with good developers
who can rapidly prototype; accustomed to doing business that
way, building anything needed in-house (however minimalistic
and duct-taped together), and being bewildered at actually
spending cash to save time.

Many of these people will display belligerence and hostility toward your
pricing model because they don't understand the value proposition, nor
have a reference frame for those kinds of costs. They also do not
understand the economics of vendor support, professional services,
scalability, etc.

If I were paying several thousand dollars a quarter - at a minimum - to
use Enswitch, I would have fairly high expectations, and from what I
understand, your company can and does deliver on them.

-- Alex

--
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems
Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671

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