Forrester Research has recently published a study on the understanding that users have of licensing and pricing policies of software vendors.  Matt Asay actually posted a very interesting piece on this topic.

For this study, the Cambridge, Mass. analyst firm, under the leadership of R. “Ray” Wang, has surveyed over 200 enterprise IT professionals and conducted about 20 follow-on interviews.

The results are tough on proprietary software vendors:

“According to these users, software licensing and pricing continues to be marred by complexity, soaring maintenance costs, and a lack of flexibility and alignment with business goals.”

Maintenance costs reach up to 26% of the TCO, when enterprises wished it would not exceed 16%.

This survey highlights the fact that vendors leverage this complexity to prevent any comparison with their competitors.  The decrease in license costs is only used to hide the rise of maintenance costs.  As an illustration, the price list of a well known vendor is over 100 pages long, and you don’t account for terms & conditions there…

Yet another validation of our model!  The vast majority of our clients mention the simplicity of the licensing model as one of the major advantages of Talend’s open source solutions.  When we launched Talend On Demand last May, it was met by enthusiasm from the community – SaaS is another key simplifying factor.  We also announced recently offers specifically targeting Sunopsis’ users and Genio’s users in order to help users who are faced with post-merger uncertainty find an affordable and high performance alternative.

Transparency is one of the most important assets open source brings the table.

Bertrand