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Originally Posted by ivo_toshev Hm,
If the price of the license is $30 per user per year ( as it was noted in forums ) , so for 200 users it is $6000 per year. |
One point -- when we released the Beta of our Network Edition earlier this week, we clarified that the annual subscription price would be $28/user/year. See this posting:
ZCS 3.0 Milestone 2 Released Quote:
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Originally Posted by ivo_toshev it will took 2 years to make the price of Novell GroupWise and 3 years for full MS Exchange 2003 and others |
Actually, based on published prices for MS Exchange (including annual support fees for Exchange), it takes at least 5 years for the Zimbra subscription price to match the Exchange price. By which time any Exchange customer likely would have to pay for an upgrade, or be about to, to the next Exchange version anyway. Not certain about GroupWise, but I'm also pretty sure it's considerably longer than the 2 years you mention. Please keep in mind, our subscription *includes* support -- there's not an additional annual fee for that, as there is with the other products you mentioned.
Also, we believe there is some benefit in the openness of ZCS, vs. the relatively closed architectures of the other solutions you mentioned. For example, how easily can a customer or 3rd party integrate another application via web services to one of the solutions you mentioned? Some customers have said they don't have complete confidence in the future direction, or the flexibility, of the closed-source/proprietary solutions they have chosen. We hope that by providing an open architecture, and building a community around the solution, that provides benefits beyond simply what you've directly licensed.
Finally, a lot of companies have said they *prefer* an annual subscription, because it spreads the payments out -- instead of paying a giant lump sum at the beginning, but still having to pay 15-20% in annual support -- and because it also helps make budgeting more predictible. Clearly not everyone prefers any single pricing model, but we needed to pick one, and this one seems to meet the interests of most customers. Not that we won't modify it some as we go, but I did want to provide some background/rationale for why we've chosen this pricing model and level.