[asterisk-biz] Integrics releases Enswitch 3.0

[Alex Balashov]

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