SOHO and SMB Cloud Storage Recommendations
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
At 300+ users can't you negotiate with them on price? Especially if you're considering Google instead. I assumed enterprises always ended up doing deals rather than paying the advertised rate. Is that not the case?
300 is so small, that's nowhere near the point where you have leverage to talk special pricing. Enterprises can do deals, 300 is on the small end of the SMB. Enterprises do, of course, always get custom deals. It's called EA, Enterprise Agreement. At 300 it isn't worth the cost of the negotiations to either side, nor would MS entertain it. They have stock agreements for companies bigger than that.
-
I don't really get the logic of it (but that's marketing for you). Normally, the more users you have, the better pricing you get. But here, a company with 100 users gets a better deal than one with 300.
OK, they actually get a smaller product range rather than worse pricing - but the result is the same.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
At 300+ users can't you negotiate with them on price? Especially if you're considering Google instead. I assumed enterprises always ended up doing deals rather than paying the advertised rate. Is that not the case?
300 is so small, that's nowhere near the point where you have leverage to talk special pricing. Enterprises can do deals, 300 is on the small end of the SMB. Enterprises do, of course, always get custom deals. It's called EA, Enterprise Agreement. At 300 it isn't worth the cost of the negotiations to either side, nor would MS entertain it. They have stock agreements for companies bigger than that.
We get a few dollars off with 22,000 users we were looking at. But, it's only guaranteed pricing for one year. We have no idea if they offer the discount the following year or not. It made us think it might just be an intro offer to get you stuff on it with our EA pricing and then going up each year. They count not just how many users you have but also how much other things you've bought from Microsoft in the past year under your EA. It's a bit of a gamble though.
-
@Dashrender said:
You're also not considering the other pieces that O365 bring to the table.
For us it doesn't bring anything else to the table.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't really get the logic of it (but that's marketing for you). Normally, the more users you have, the better pricing you get. But here, a company with 100 users gets a better deal than one with 300.
OK, they actually get a smaller product range rather than worse pricing - but the result is the same.
Actually in things like this smaller companies very often get better pricing - because they get far less value from the product and the hope is that they will grow.
Although the result is really not the same. For a 300 person company the value to things like SharePoint and Yammer are generally decently large. Smaller companies might lack the resources to even set them up.
At 100 users the "network effect" of O365 products is not as valuable as it is to a 300 and the chances of being multi-site are lower. There are many factors.
Scale normally only gets you a discount if you can leverage that scale. At 300, you cannot. But at 100, you are too easy of a customer to lose, so there is a discount tied to getting less capability.
Seems very logical to me. A 100 person company could pretty easily just install Linux and be done with it or use other free products. At 300, chances are you are a lot more addicted to Exchange.
-
Well it's not logical to me. Not at 22,000 users.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
Well it's not logical to me. Not at 22,000 users.
But why isn't it logical? Where is the reasoning incorrect?
-
MSPs providing services to the enterprise space cost a lot more per hour too - because it is assumed that they will deliver more services, higher end people, more responsiveness, management teams and all kinds of extra stuff. Do you feel that enterprises should pay lower hourly rates than SMBs?
-
@scottalanmiller said:
Actually in things like this smaller companies very often get better pricing - because they get far less value from the product and the hope is that they will grow.
Examples? I can't think of any. And I don't mean examples where 10 users or less are dirt cheap or free. I mean where 200 users is cheaper than 300 or similar break points.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Actually in things like this smaller companies very often get better pricing - because they get far less value from the product and the hope is that they will grow.
Examples? I can't think of any. And I don't mean examples where 10 users or less are dirt cheap or free. I mean where 200 users is cheaper than 300 or similar break points.
Often it is not break points but in products. If you need routing for a 100 person company, you use products like Ubiquiti for $100. But if you need 10,000 people you are spending 30,000 on your routing.
That's a leap of 300% per person.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
If you need routing for a 100 person company, you use products like Ubiquiti for $100. But if you need 10,000 people you are spending 30,000 on your routing.
I wouldn't know, but I'm asking about software examples, not physical items like hardware or labour.
-
Also, why should I expect a lower quality service from an MSP than an enterprise? Does NTG operate a two-tier structure or do you only support SMBs and therefore charge a lower price than enterprise supporting MSPs?
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
If you need routing for a 100 person company, you use products like Ubiquiti for $100. But if you need 10,000 people you are spending 30,000 on your routing.
I wouldn't know, but I'm asking about software examples, not physical items like hardware or labour.
Well this is a service example, not software, that you are starting from. But if you want similar ones....
Atlassian makes its tools super cheap for small teams and only expensive for large ones. GitHub is free for very small companies. Developer tools are almost always free or cheap for really small companies. The JetBrains suites are half the price for individuals than for individuals within a company.
Of the software that I deal with, I would say that most non-consumer is cheaper for small companies even on a per user basis. Tons of hosted products work this way. Free or cheap to start and as you grow they add some trivial features and make it more and more expensive on a per user basis.
Typically once you hit the top tier AND go significantly over it (hitting the "beyond our intended scale" numbers) where there are no additional features or perceived benefits there is often a way to negotiate down on price - often because at that scale it is believed that a customer is large enough to be able to recreate the product if they so desired.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
Also, why should I expect a lower quality service from an MSP than an enterprise? Does NTG operate a two-tier structure or do you only support SMBs and therefore charge a lower price than enterprise supporting MSPs?
Who said lower quality? I mentioned different services. Enterprises expect a completely different type of engagement than SMBs, by and large. Having been an enterprise customer, this is very true. The entire engagement process is totally dissimilar.
-
"more services, higher end people, more responsiveness, management teams and all kinds of extra stuff"
Does that not suggest lower quality to you?
I've worked for companies providing support to both enterprises and SMBs and we provided the same level of support regardless of who the client was.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
"more services, higher end people, more responsiveness, management teams and all kinds of extra stuff"
Does that not suggest lower quality to you?
Certainly not. Does not getting Access, Sharepoint and Yammer suggest lower quality for your Exchange with Office 365?
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
I've worked for companies providing support to both enterprises and SMBs and we provided the same level of support regardless of who the client was.
Why is why I suggested nothing in terms of differences in quality. Any SMB can engage an enterprise MSP, like NTG, if they chose to. But they would need to pay enterprise rates to get enterprise services like on site permanent staff, dedicated account and project managers and the such. Those are not quality differences, they are different services. And ones that would be pretty crazy to try to force on a normal SMB.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
Examples? I can't think of any. And I don't mean examples where 10 users or less are dirt cheap or free. I mean where 200 users is cheaper than 300 or similar break points.
@scottalanmiller said:
Atlassian makes its tools super cheap for small teams and only expensive for large ones. GitHub is free for very small companies. Developer tools are almost always free or cheap for really small companies. The JetBrains suites are half the price for individuals than for individuals within a company.
Atlassian is $2 per user for 50 users or $6 per user for 100 users. A perfect example of my point. There must be some examples other than Microsoft, surely? I just don't know of any.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
Atlassian is $2 per user for 50 users or $6 per user for 100 users. A perfect example of my point. There must be some examples other than Microsoft, surely? I just don't know of any.
And just $1 per user for 10. Didn't you just make my point? Price goes up as you get bigger.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
Any SMB can engage an enterprise MSP, like NTG, if they chose to. But they would need to pay enterprise rates to get enterprise services like on site permanent staff, dedicated account and project managers and the such. Those are not quality differences, they are different services. And ones that would be pretty crazy to try to force on a normal SMB.
OK, let's not get sidetracked by MSP services. It's a different topic. This is a situation where @Jason is being penalized financially for having more than 300 users and I'm trying to find any similar examples.
