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They're very enterprise focused, so you might not be the target customer? (I don't want to presume, however) For a lot of powerful but heavyweight enterprise p
by staysaasy 6y ago
They're very enterprise focused, so you might not be the target customer? (I don't want to presume, however)
For a lot of powerful but heavyweight enterprise products, giving people access to pricing isn't worth it because it can cause some buyers to opt out of the process earlier than they would if their hands were held. Especially if the integration process will require some element of digital/IT transformation and hence internal political wrangling. There's tech for smooth onboarding in 2020, but not necessarily tech for helping you to do stakeholder alignment in a sales context.
The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work..
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago> The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work.. If it doesn't make sense it's because it makes dollars...
- aspenmayer 6y agoThis one is going in my memo book!
- ricopags 6y agoAny attribution for that quote? Because I am going to steal it. Is it just a transposition of "If it doesn't make dollars it doesn't make sense" which I see as a headline a few places?
- niea_11 6y agoIt made me think of a rap song by DJ Quick : If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense https://genius.com/Dj-quik-dollaz-sense-lyrics https://genius.com/Dj-quik-dollaz-sense-lyrics
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoI first heard it in an MC Plus+ song: https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/MC_Plus%2B:Plastic_Actuals https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/MC_Plus%2B:Plastic_Actuals It’s also a pun: “sense” / “cents”.
- Swizec 6y agoIt makes sense. Enterprise sales processes are very very long and hand-holdy. The final price is very dependent on the amount of value a product brings to this particular organization. It also involves lots of negotiation. None of those fit in a pricing page. Maybe as a very dynamic calculator it could work, but it's likely the person looking at the page doesn't even have enough context/info to fill out the calculator.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoAzure and AWS both have straightforward pricing calculators on their websites though.
- scarface74 6y agoBut if you are a large enterprise, you’re not going to just pay list price.
- sulam 6y agoI don't know about Azure, but AWS is also very transparent with their volume discounts. You know exactly what price you're going to get, without talking to sales. And they don't negotiate those discounts. (At least they don't up to the $50M / yr level, which is the highest I've directly observed.)
- Swizec 6y agoWhich is why a whole industry exists focused solely on helping you understand your AWS bill and how to optimize it. Right?
- youeseh 6y agoPremature optimization is the root of all evil. If you don't need to automate, then don't automate!
- bretpiatt 6y agoThe interesting bit on this is Rackspace was actually the first build-to-order "Configure a Server [with pricing]" on the Internet in 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/20000302000851/http://www.rackspace.com/goconfigure/pricing.php3 https://web.archive.org/web/20000302000851/http://www.racksp...
- QUFB 6y agoAmazon learned with AWS that you can generate extreme profit when the devops team expenses instances/lambdas/absolutelyEverything on their company card. Click/click/click, spend. What is the result? Customers then create Organizations and accounts, and pay orders of magnitude more.
- stingraycharles 6y agoI think the idea is that Rackspace wants to focus on a different target audience than AWS, and hence has a different sales process.
- sswaner 6y agoCorrect, my company uses both Rackspace and AWS. We host legacy platforms with low rates of change on Rackspace and use AWS for new work that has high change rates and requires flexibility.
- QUFB 6y agoBut Amazon gets the same audience, in addition to others! The initial spending on personal/corporate cards from engineers who need to get work done drives the adoption of AWS.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoWhy do enterprises even initiate conversations with third parties if they won't immediately give you a price? Just move on to someone who will. If your options are $10,000 or <price unknown> its obvious option #2 will be more. If businesses categorically rejected working with companies that can't provide up-front estimates, they wouldn't be a thing.
- evrydayhustling 6y agoFor enterprise deals, the price is often a small part of the overall cost of ownership. The defining element of enterprise deals is complication: large companies don't tend to buy the product as advertised. They need the vendor to make lots of adjustments and carry out extra processes to deploy (or else those costs fall back on the buyer). So, until the buyer's requirements have been explored, there's not a useful estimate to be had.
- tjalfi 6y agoThis. There are no easy purchases in an enterprise. Working with any third party requires an NDA, contract review, and negotiations by our Purchasing department.
- frenchy 6y agoProbably a simliar reason as why I won't normally give an up-front price when doing contracting work. For better, or for worse, "enterprise" folk are trying to sell "solutions" and not services. This usually works out well for them, because the people who they're selling to don't usually understand the technical minutae, and will often get the details wrong or incomplete.
- dman 6y agoBecause from an enterprise point of view they want to negotiate and arm twist vendors. Large players can and do use their weight to get pretty hefty discounts.
- bityard 6y ago