Well, I wake up to a new year, and it seems many familiar companies have been bought or sold. Here is a quick round up of the M&A activity in Enterprise Software:
and probably many more that I might have missed in the January Sales... Something I don't know much about, and hopefully someone can inform me is - what happens to the SE and Sales resources when their company gets sold?
Mastering the Art of Technical Sales
Friday, January 25, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Virtual Software Licensing
What will the biggest change in what, how and why we are selling software in 2008 be? Virtualization is it - if you believe virtualization.info in their prediction for 2008 and several other news articles I've read recently such as this computerworld article.
When you think about it, when you sell enterprise software, what you are selling is a right to use a particular set of software in a particular way on a certain number of systems. When these systems are just simple hardware devices running a particular operating system this is quite easy.
However in the past few years these underlying systems are becoming more often than not virtualized using products like VMware. In some cases vendors have already changed their license conditions to support the way customers want to use products, such as Windows Server DataCenter Edition. However in other cases these changes are more negative, to disallow certain uses of software - such as MS Vista home products on virtual systems - or increase the cost - often without adding any additional functionality.
This shift in the conditions around the use of existing products really will change how we can sell software, and potentially affect the size of deals - measured in virtual systems might well be 2-3x higher for the same company.
Other advantages of virtualization might also lead to current license conditions needing a rethink - for instance it is really easy now to start up a cloned copy of an existing server - does this mean we need an additional copy of each license on that machine?
One tough thing is - how are we supposed to find out how many licenses a customer needs? How are they supposed to know. Managing virtual machines is much harder than tracking physical hardware. It is so much more fluid, can be there one day and not the next. Could be 1 machine today and 32 tomorrow. Should a customer buy a license for their potential number of virtual machines, their peak number, their average number or their current number.
Meanwhile, I read these posts which I found quite informative on the subject:
When you think about it, when you sell enterprise software, what you are selling is a right to use a particular set of software in a particular way on a certain number of systems. When these systems are just simple hardware devices running a particular operating system this is quite easy.
However in the past few years these underlying systems are becoming more often than not virtualized using products like VMware. In some cases vendors have already changed their license conditions to support the way customers want to use products, such as Windows Server DataCenter Edition. However in other cases these changes are more negative, to disallow certain uses of software - such as MS Vista home products on virtual systems - or increase the cost - often without adding any additional functionality.
This shift in the conditions around the use of existing products really will change how we can sell software, and potentially affect the size of deals - measured in virtual systems might well be 2-3x higher for the same company.
Other advantages of virtualization might also lead to current license conditions needing a rethink - for instance it is really easy now to start up a cloned copy of an existing server - does this mean we need an additional copy of each license on that machine?
One tough thing is - how are we supposed to find out how many licenses a customer needs? How are they supposed to know. Managing virtual machines is much harder than tracking physical hardware. It is so much more fluid, can be there one day and not the next. Could be 1 machine today and 32 tomorrow. Should a customer buy a license for their potential number of virtual machines, their peak number, their average number or their current number.
Meanwhile, I read these posts which I found quite informative on the subject:
- Software Licenses will become Nightmare (scary but it is an interesting problem that someone needs to solve)
- IBM - counting Licenses in virtual environments (they make it sound so simple)
- Multi-core and Virtual promote open source
- IT Managers say keep it simple (this is particularly against IBM's complex licensing)
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