joako wrote:I think the point TheDude was making, and I'll agree I have setup scalix community for some smaller clients in the same boat, that many people can live without AS support if their only choice is upgrade to Enterprise Edition AND pay for those licenses, vs just pay a per-device license fee and keep the community edition.
So just to recapitulate - you are currently making money (assuming you charge your smaller clients for your work at least) on a product we are creating with huge development efforts and we don't see a dime on this. Which is fine as this is how community edition is laid out. Now you are suggesting that we should start throwing in even more functionality - especially one, wireless contact and calendar sync, that is used in business environments. People using such functionality are willing to buy pretty expensive phones (two of those, on the expensive side, costs around the same as our 20 user starter kit!), paying monthly fees to their carriers that top our per-mailbox one-time perpetual license fee. You would probably charge these folks for setting all this up or hosting it. And again we should be the ones seeing minimal return, although the active sync module, when finished, will have taken an investment of several man years (i.e. in the 6-7 digit range) to create?
Sorry to say so, but I don't think this makes sense. At all.
The big IT houses are going to be using Exchange anyways those looking for an alternative probably are either 1) the minority, those that just have a personal preference for software that isn't made in Redmond (I'm one of those but...) and those are probably the ones NOT running Outlook and not running Windows Mobile device (I won't part with mine, however) 2) looking for a solution on a budget.
Not true. We are just looking at winning over a customer that I am personally involved with that is five digit user range, pretty much Exchange suitespot, and the reasons why they consider going with us is that we provide for more flexibility, we don't force particular directory architectures (think AD) upon them, and we are easier to deploy and cost effective.
Even if the pricing was the same as Exchange, there would be cases we could make for our product. It is way cheaper, though, especially for Enterprise accounts, if you take the lack of a per-server license fee, the cheaper operating system, the easier upgrades (11.3 to 11.4 takes 10 minutes - try that with Exchange) and others into account.
Add to that features that you don't have with Exchange - like the newly introduced Proxy Folders or a webclient that is a true desktop replacement with full delegation and now Overlay Calendars or CalDAV client support and many more, and suddenly Scalix becomes real value for money.
Sure, we haven't seriously broken into Microsoft's market share big time, but then you're talking about one of the cornerstone products of the world's largest software maker, sitting there at 70%+ or so market share worldwide. I'm pretty happy with a fraction of that as it is, but this is serious business and not a toy store. And, for the record, we have won a couple of large shops in the past and I believe will continue to do so.
Say the pricing is $50 per device per end use for Enterprise Edition customers I would see it as a **HUGE** selling point for CE if you could just buy those same licenses (and also additional seat licenses for premium users) at the same price with no minimums and no strings attached.
The additional cost for the ActiveSync option is yet to be announced, but what I can say is that it is going to be per-user, you will be able to add it to both Small Business Edition and Enterprise Edition, and you will be able to add it to both Premium and Standard Users. Given that the price of even a premium user starts is at around $20-$30 (depending on the market and if you buy the SBE-50 starter kit) and the price of a standard user is substantially less, if you then add some imaginary value for the wireless option on top of it, you will end up with a WAY lower per-user cost than the number you are providing. We've looked at the market, the offering is highly competitive and we see no reason to make it even cheaper. I don't think the base price of SBE-20 and SBE-50, also considering it inlcudes some basic support, is prohibitive for anyone in search for a solution with integrated wireless capabilities. Just to repeat, all these prices are lower than Microsoft's Small Business Server if your main use for it is Collaboration (slightly different when you start using SQL and others, but actually manu people only use Windows Server, AD and Exchange), which is already priced VERY agressively.
You say Enterprise Edition is a value compared with Microsoft SBS, but SBS includes the Outlook licenses ... well I can't do a price comparison because sometime in the past approx 6 months all pricing details were deleted from scalix.com, but from what I recall smallest edition cost $1500 for 20 users.
Well, SBS starts at 5 users, which is basically covered by Community. User packs are not that cheap. SBS 2003 currently does include Outlook, but given Microsoft have removed the Outlook licenses from Exchange 2007, I wonder if the next version of SBS will follow along with this. The key point is - with Scalix you can use Outlook, but you don't need to - many people are replacing Outlook with Scalix Web Access these days and are more than happy to do so, saving both cost and maint efforts. Alternatively, you can use free Mozilla eMail and Calendaring clients - our clients of choice are more than ever.
And the price point you're giving is incorrect, our lowest package with 20 users goes for about $650, and at around $1000 you already get 50 users, so we are way more cost-effective even on the base licenses and not taking other cost into account.
SBS is $560 (T72-01411, from CDW, but can find it for <$400) for 5 users + 15 CAL (T74-00001) would run approx $1700 from CDW) = 85/user... less than the cost of an Outlook license.
Scalix works out to be is $144 per user ($45 Scalix) when you consider Outlook costs (543-03007, $99 from CDW). Evolution connector for Scalix is no way on par with using Outlook.
Well, again, you got the numbers all wrong - if you want to get the true story, please contact Scalix sales or one of our resellers and they'll make the case for you. I really won't engage into this discussion here.
So besides the Microsoft FUD and perceived problems of inter-vendor compatibility there are the costs which are almost identical between products. You might say open and select license get better pricing for Outlook...well those are the shops that are more likely to be licensing the entire Office suite and which are more likely to use large AD forests and use Exchange because "its from the same vendor so it will integrate better"
Again, 9 out of 10 (or is it 98 out of 100) customers tell us different, so I will take that as good reaon to believe their words....
If you really believe you're cheaper and better off by doing Exchange, with all the consequences, the interesting question becomes why do you continue bothering and simply go with it. Others come to different conclusions, based on true numbers and facts, and we're happy to have them as customers.
You can trust that we watch the market together with feedback from customers and prospects very carefully and come up with packages that allow us to grow our share in a highly competitive market.
Florian.