The week of November 8th 2010, Telerik conducted a great Webinar presented by my dear friend Gabe Sumner, Sitefinity’s Chief evangelist at Telerik.
During the webinar, Gabe showed many features of the upcoming Release Candidate and also shared with the community, almost 1000 webinar attendees, the new pricing model, the new partners model and their new tiered approach.
I have to admit, I have been working with Telerik for the last 6 years on all their products as a partner, consultant, trainer and most of all a friend of the company and a close friend to their management and lots of their wonderful employees worldwide.
A lot of the people I talked to after the webinar took the information very well and were very excited to start a new chapter with Sitefinity 4 for themselves and for their customers, nevertheless some of the people also had a problem with the pricing model and I respect both sides and understand both argument.
I would like to first of all assure you that I am not an employee of Telerik and I have no influence on Telerik’s decisions or future plans whatsoever. So my opinion here is mainly just that, my opinion
In the last 4 years I have been involved in building over 60 web sites in Sitefinity worldwide, some were for small business (dentists, schools, non profit) some were for medium size businesses in the USA, Europe and Australia and some were definitely for large corporations worldwide as well (Oil companies, major Universities, Government agencies and Fortune 500 corporations).
I am aware of most of the major and minor CMS systems out there and I have respect for all entities whether commercial or open source.
I remember the days when I had to implement CMS systems by hand for customers and also the days when I just paid for licenses on behalf of my customers in the mid 1990s. Just to give some of you an idea that serious corporations used to license CMS systems like PlumTree and Epicentric per CPU. I remember paying $250,000 per CPU during the .COM days for these products. Yes you read that correctly , a Quad Machine running PlumTree in 1996-1997 cost $1 Million dollars to just run the software, without any customization or integration, with way less features than Sitefinity offers today in 3.7
In the not so distant past, you could download a good CMS system like DotNetNuke, or Rainbow, or any others that are open source for pretty much FREE, nowadays, most of these companies offer a commercial version that is very much in line with the new pricing offered by Sitefinity 4.0
Is Sitefinity 3.7 a Good Product?
I would say YES after building over 60 web sites commercially using this technology. Does Sitefinity 3.7 have issues? Of course, which product doesn’t? I always hated Nolics for instance (The Database ORM tool behind Sitefinity 3.7), I never used the Wiki module as it is not even close to the maturity of other Wiki systems on the market, I did not like the separation of Taxonomies between modules and other small things but in the end I was always able to work around these things and get the best out of Sitefinity and my customers always LOVED the solutions we delivered at the end.
Pricing:
Did I like the fact that I can offer Sitefinity to my small businesses for $899 per domain? Of course, my customers loved it too! Was it fair? I really doubt it.
Can you imagine asking a customer to pay $899 to get the entire CMS system for their domain with unlimited admins and users with all its functionality and offer your service as a consultant and trainer for a couple of hours that will cost the customer more in one day of service than what they paid for the entire system? It was always awkward and required a lot of explanation.
With big companies it was even worse, we always demoed Sitefinity and its features in person or over Gotomeeting and they always loved it and once we say the product is $899 per domain, a lot of doubt starts happening. why is this product so cheap? what is the catch? how come the competition asked for 10 times more? there must be something there that we are not seeing. That is what almost every time went on with Oil Companies or FORTUNE 500 companies.
The other bad business, in my opinion, was the fact that I can build a site for a Dentist for example that require just ONE login username to access the system and update all its content with 20 to 25 pages and a dozen controls for the same price ($899) that a company that made $44 billion dollars in profit last quarter for using Sitefinity 3.7 on four load balanced machines accessed by over 4000 users to control content worldwide and hundreds of pages (localized), yes for $899. No, I did not think that was fair. Something had to change! I am actually glad Telerik is going the route they are in pricing as I would like to see the product succeed, mature and reach new heights in the CMS industry.
Some of us underestimate the effort it takes to have top notch people answering your questions within ONE day no matter what it is and how much code or research it requires, folks that cost money and Telerik has been one of the BEST companies in the world in customer service. They truly care for their customer and depend on their success.
Did Telerik think it might lose customers with the new pricing model? I have no doubt! These are extremely intelligent people and these decisions are always calculated. They have to answer to a Board of Directors like any other corporation. When your company is employing over 300 great people worldwide and in 2010 the Sitefinity team became the largest team inside of Telerik, someone had to ask the question, what does Telerik need to do to take Sitefinity into the future technically and financially. Continuing to sell Sitefinity 4.0 for $899 meant that we would not have Sitefinity at ALL in the next year or so as it is not a valid option financially for Telerik and the Board might have shut down that project altogether if it is meaningless to the future of the company.
Will some of you stop using Sitefinity because of the price, Yes I am sure you will and I can assure you it pains the team at Telerik to see that happen, I know because I spoke with them last month in Bulgaria and they WANT TO DO THE RIGHT THING.
To have 10,000 mom & pop shops using Sitefinity for Free or for a minimum cost and use 80 to 90 percent of the support whether through the forums or through the ticket system, is just not a good model.
To give away the product to an oil rich company to run their public and internal business in several countries for anything less than $20k is just not a good business either.
There is a lot more to chat about in the next couple of month, but for now as my blog is getting enormous I would say, give it a shot and try to understand the pricing and what you really need to get your customer on board. I think you will be very pleased and very proud! Telerik is offering to help customers, partners and agencies in training them on how to sell Sitefinity 4.0, that is Awesome!
As for Falafel, we will start offering 3 training classes within 10 days of the release of the product on January 14th 2011:
- Business Users Training
- Admins, Designers and IT Training
- Developers Training
The cost will be very similar to Telerik’s:
- To participate in the first 5 minutes of the training, will be free
- For Community training and Non Profit, you can see me teaching the first chapter with a maximum of 10 pages from the book.
- For Standard training, you can see the whole training but during localization and analytics, I will have to mute my microphone
- For Pro and Pro Unlimited, you are free to sit in on the whole enchilata
That last part is Just a joke folks
Love to all
Lino