Very insightful comments. I must agree.

People buy, not companies, and this is based on the sense that you’ll be there on the long run. A small company can hardly compete against a top notch player, unless that company uses the personalized approach that is hard to get with account managers from SAP, Oracle, etc. A small company can be quicker and closer to the decision making process.

This has been a silver bullet I used very often in my work experience with small sized companies. So please guys, don’t speak like “avoiding the sales people” as an advantage, whether to scale up a company or to create competitive advantages.

I like the general idea, but developing a generic pricing model for it might prove to be challenging, especially when selling a generic piece of infrastructure software as we do. I tend to believe that such a model might be better suited to companies that are using our software in order to develop business solutions that are sold to business users directly.

Still around the “distribution model” subject… Several companies are creating “Shared Services” groups and outsourcing complete business processes, instead of just IT infrastratucture or discrete pieces of processes. Basically, this is driven by the never-ending search for cost savings, productivity improvements and synergy development between disparate business units, functional-driven departments, etc. A real shift in distribution model could be to make Intalio products the enabling tools for such initiatives, forging “shared revenues/savings” agreements with customers. That could create an extreme win-win situation, where Intalio could incur less sales/marketing costs, develop increased focus on customer success, and eventually generate better results as a corporation.

I agree with you. This model very much relies on the development of strong channels and does not remove the need for marketing. The only thing that changes is that customers will see less sales representatives driving expensive cars, but I’m not sure that they’ll complain much about it.

Fair objection. List prices are often discounted indeed. Nevertheless, now matter how big the discount ends up being, customers willing to use in a production environment BPMS software provided by IBM, Oracle and SAP need to purchase a license upfront. Our model is different in the sense that customers can go into production without having to purchase a license upfront, as long as they are using Geronimo and MySQL. Once they feel that they need to upgrade to a more robust database, or deploy on top of the application server they picked as corporate standard, all they have to do is purchase a license, enter a license key, move one EAR file and one WAR file, and they are up and running again, this time on their deployment platform of choice. This incremental adoption model is explained in more details on our website and really is what makes us different.

Regarding your question on our federated model, what we mean by ‘federated’ is that multiple vendors such as Celequest and Intalio team up to deliver a complete solution. More details on this partnership will be unveiled as we announce additional partners over the next few weeks.

Also, are you suggesting that your pricing model is qualitatively different from “the big guys?”

Is it really? They’ve always been able to look at — and price to — a total revenue stream that consists of initial license fees, customization services, and ongoing maintenance and support. Given that the big guys have always been able to discount any of these components to help close the sale, how is what your are doing any different from the customer’s point of view?