RFQ For BI Software Pricing Research
On my Q3 research agenda is a document reviewing typical BI software pricing configurations. Unfortunately, I find that just asking vendors whether they have this or that pricing policy (by number of named users, number of concurrent users, server type, etc.) usually just gets me “Yes, we have it all” or “It depends” answers. Not really useful. So this time I plan to nail down the vendors to three specific quotes given three very specific configurations. Here’s my first cut at the RFQ. I plan to send it out to:
- All of the large BI vendors covered in our BI Wave
- A few tier two BI vendors covered in our BI Self-Service report
- All OSS BI vendors (evaluating their commercial versions)
- A few SaaS/cloud BI vendors
|
|
Small business |
Medium-size business |
Enterprise |
|
Functionality: reporting, querying, dashboards, OLAP |
All |
All |
All |
|
Revenues |
$50 million |
$500 million |
$10 billion |
|
Administrators |
1 |
2 |
5 |
|
Database administrators |
1 |
3 |
10 |
|
Developers |
2 |
5 |
20 |
|
Power users/BI content authors |
5 |
20 |
100 |
|
Users who interact with reports |
10 |
50 |
200 |
|
Users who only view reports |
50 |
100 |
500 |
|
External users (customers/partners) who only view reports |
0 |
100 |
1,000 (concurrent) |
|
Report scheduling and distribution |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Connectivity to DBMS and ERP sources | 2 DBMS sources | 2 DBMS 1 ERP source | 3 DBMS 2 ERP sources |
|
Server CPUs (cores or sockets) |
4 |
8 |
32 |
|
Server clock speed |
TBD |
TBD |
TBD |
|
Server OS |
Windows |
Unix |
Unix |
|
Environments: development, testing, |
D, T, P |
D, T, P, DR |
D, T, U, P, DR |
|
Number of departments |
2 |
3 |
5 |
|
Number of projects/applications |
5 |
10 |
20 |
| Minimum basic/starter training for developers, administrators and power users | |||
|
Initial software license price? |
$ |
$ |
$ |
|
Annual maintenance, which should include all technical support, bug fixes and upgrades |
% |
% |
% |
|
Term in years? |
X |
X |
X |
|
If financed, monthly/yearly price? |
$ |
$ |
$ |
|
If SaaS, monthly/yearly price? |
$ |
$ |
$ |
| If you offer other products (hardware, ERP applications, etc) do bundle it with BI and if yes, do you offer discounts and/or BI credits for other products | % discount, $ value credits, etc for $500K in other purchases | % discount, $ value credits, etc for $2M in other purchases | % discount, $ value credits, etc for $10M in other purchases |
What am I missing in the RFQ? Any other gotchas I should watch out for?
