[asterisk-biz] Integrics releases Enswitch 3.0

[Alistair Cunningham]

Alex Balashov wrote:
> 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,

I agree with all of this, and your comments are very fair.

We don't do formal market segmentation, just a sliding scale according 
to concurrent calls (and features on larger systems), and our price 
structure has had only minor tweaking in the last two years.

Alistair Cunningham
+1 888 468 3111
+44 20 799 39 799
http://integrics.com/