Pricing is a tricky beast. I've seen a lot of models out there, and each has pros and cons. Firstly it depends on who are your target customers. My experience is in Enterprise software, which typically has a larger transaction price and volume, yet the number of deals is smaller. When focusing on SMBs as a target, the models change along with the selling motion. For good reasons most software companies want to have both models, but I haven't seen many companies able to execute this strategy. You end up with vendors adopting one model and causing fractures in the way tooling is licensed, many times the economics don't equate to good business decisions for the end user or the vendor. Here are the various licensing models I've seen in the IT Operations Management space: Application footprint or infrastructure footprint based pricing Per node, per CPU, per application server, per JVM, per CLR, per runtime User-based pricing Per concurrent user, per named
Jonah Kowall is the VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics, driving the company’s product roadmap and vision, entry into new markets and providing technology and business insights. Previously 15 years as a practitioner at several startups and larger enterprises focused on infrastructure and operations, security, and performance engineering. In 2011 Jonah changed careers, moving to Gartner to focus on availability and performance monitoring and IT operations management (ITOM).