Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
It is pretty amusing, the number of software vendors that are selling us tools to work in our Agile and/or DevOps infrastructure but are not at all agile in their sales cycle implementation.
Top-line vendor hint: If you have a page titled “pricing” and there are no prices on it, you’re doin’ it wrong.
Let’s be serious, here. I should not have to drop everything, call you and go through a whole lengthy, involved process before I can implement a product that you claim makes my development or deployment life cycle more agile.
Beyond the ‘there is no price on the pricing page’ issue, there are the vendors that go to great lengths to keep us from knowing what they cost. Some fail because they have public cloud images with pricing on them, but some even get around that by including “bring your own license” and selling the instance cheaply.
In almost every case, competitor pricing is available, is simple and TCO can be calculated. If yours can’t, you are not winning mindshare.
I probably recounted here that, once, a big-name database vendor tried to charge us insane amounts using the “You have to talk to us” model. I escalated to my VP, who told the salesperson, “I am not buying your Lamborghini,” and we then paid to have the product ported to a competing database with open and easy pricing and minimized use of the product on the offending DB. The moral of the story is, “Keep it simple and make it worthwhile.” We would have paid millions more than we did (which was already a lot) for that project. The vendor got nothing by making convoluted pricing schemes that allowed them to say every endpoint was a user and insisting we should pay the full license price for them.
Top line vendor hint number two: We’re professionals. We install, configure and manage a variety of systems every day. If your system requires services to get up and running, you should consider why that is.
We are not looking to spend months scheduling installation and configuration because you, the vendor, think services are a mandatory part of implementation. We can deploy entire infrastructures without requiring assistance; what is wrong with your product that we cannot deploy it in the same manner?
In general, organizations are willing to pay well for a product that does the job. Hidden pricing, confusing pricing and mandatory services to get the system running all make it harder for an organization to evaluate the value of the product. Saying “Start Free Trial” without explaining pricing is perhaps the funniest vendor move ever. Of course we want to know what we might be getting into before we sign up for that free trial!
Sell us good tools at a clear and reasonable price. We’ll buy them. Because we have a job to do and we want the tools to do it. We don’t want to drop everything to find out what it will cost us to do it and we don’t want to be forced to buy services to get it running.
