This actually might push us away from SolarWinds (it's not my decision). I would love to keep using Orion but the people above me are not happy with the price increase and have started looking at other software.
Same here. Maintenance costs are way too expensive to justify year after year.
I have the same feedback from my management team. We're actually bringing online another product incoming months. (aargh!)
Here are some quotes from Solarwinds reports and documentation:"Define and implement a solid network management environment - without sacrifising their budgets""Choosing a product can be a time consuming and labour intensive activity, even though the number of vendors and service providers of the small and midsize market is relative small. The reason for this is that IT management frameworks with robust functionality do not scale down in price, while price-accessible point solutions are no longer adequate to maintain efficient IT operations.To date, cost hase been the primary driver in the small- to midsize-business market for making toolset desisions, to the detriment of functionality."I can go on with quoting out of solarwinds documentation where time after time the low pricing is one of the selling points. An increase of over 100% is in this case very hard to explain.PS i am not dissatisfied about the product bud i am getting complains from the Business as well.Greetings,
I agree that some advance notification should have been in order.Our vendor management department pays this fee yearly and did not have funding in their budget for this large increase.Releasing all these new features requires increased development along with the associated costs.However releasing buggy software drives up support calls which also increases support costs.This makes it seems like the level of support we receive is not commensurate with the cost of yearly maintenance.
Greetings,
Mars,
We can't publish a calendar of exactly when each release will ship because development schedules are subject to change. I can tell you that we ship most modules 2 or 3 times a year. We are trying to ship Orion twice a year.
To give you a concrete example: Look at NetFlow Traffic Analyzer:
v1.0 - Dec 06
v2.0 - April 07
v2.1 - June 07
v2.2 - Sept 07
v3.0 - due in Q2
Other modules are similar. We also deliver service packs with bug fixes in between releases to get customers' issues addressed in a timely fashion. Obviously, I'm biased, but I think we deliver an awful lot of software for your maintenance fees.
I am feeling the same pressure here from higher up. We just renewed in December but we have been asked to look at other solutions with the ability for more customization (see below).
Only this way we are able to assess if paying the Maintenance fees is justified or just buying the software every 3 or 4 years. Now we can only guess about the number of hotfixes security updates or renewals we will get in a years time.
This is only too true. We are looking into a few options that are not as closely tied with Cisco. Not everyone uses Cisco extensively, but we can not take advantage of some of the features of Orion on our non-Cisco gear (so some data we can get for all routers, and some we can only get from the Cisco gear). Something more vendor "in-specific" may be in the budget for next year...
Aaron
Same here. We've been asked to look at look at other products and to reassess whether we renew our maintenance. Our rep said "the decision to increase the list price of both the license and maintenance for Orion was to reflect the value of the solution in today's environments". But this decision doesn't seem well communicated to the community of users (we learned of the price increase when we received our renewal quote and thought the total due was a misprint).
We are also not a Cisco-heavy shop, so as the value gets tied to a specific vendor, we feel we're unable to take advantage of certain features.
Bryan
I'm curious as to which vendors you see us as falling short on. Orion is very much a multi-vendor product. We support pretty much everything that Cisco has, but that's just a reflection of their market dominance, but we also support most other vendors such as Juniper, HP, etc.
And we're expanding that multi-vendor support. For instance,our next version of NetFlow will support sFlow, which adds 11 new vendors to our traffic analysis solution.
Likewise, our next version of Orion will introduce a new and greatly improved Custom MIB poller, which will include support for Table MIBs, increased usability, and increased scalability. In short, it will give us the ability to poll just about anything. Later in the year, we'd like to provide the ability to more fully integrate custom-polled devices with other devices so that it becomes more transparent as to where the data is coming from.
So if you feel we've gotten more expensive, it's because we've increased engineering resources to greatly improve the product. Please do take a look at the competition, and I think you'll have a tough time finding something that's substantially less expensive than Orion with anywhere near the functionality and customizability.
Please let me what we're missing that would make a big difference to your decision. I can't promise we can fix it, but if I don't know, it's a lot less likely.
If maintenance costs are really going up this much then I will have to rethink this product too. If I am going to be way over budget (I add 15% to existing costs for the next year) for this then I may as well bite the bullet and migrate to the product our administrators use for application monitoring. I must say I was hoping that it would be our administrators that migrate to the SW application monitoring package but it is still too weak.
Time to start the discussion again???
Mail we have got last week..."On April 1st, 2010 SolarWinds adjusted the pricing tiers for Orion Network Performance Monitor. As an existing customer, we wanted to notify you about the upcoming adjustment to your annual maintenance renewal and extend a six-month grace period where you’ll be able to renew your license at the previous rates until September 30th, 2010."
I like the statement later in that mail:"Orion NPM has not increased prices in over 3 years, despite dramatic increases in product functionality over that time period."In 2007 a maintenance fee increase of over 110% ($1,995 to $4,195)In 2010 they raised it again this time 20% ($4,195 to $4,995)
So probably for that timeframe not but in general an increase of 130% just outside that window...For the increase in product functionality... I will not argue but.... In 2007 I was at NPM 8.5.1 SP2 and now 9.5.1 when I talk to managers this would be an increase of 1 version in 3 years in stead of "we try to deliver Orion twice a year"
Taking in account that a NPM slx version costs $16.000,- when they have an sales offer ($20.000 if no offer..) we will probably not extend our maintenance anymore and buy the new version in 3 or 4 years time and save some stress on the updates, as we lost functionality over a couple of months when we where upgrading to new SP's or versions.
I want to make a couple of comments. First off, we don't expect anyone to be thrilled about a price increase, but we have tried to ease the change. We've provided a grace period for customers to renew at old prices for six months since we know it's difficult to budget for this kind of change.
I've been here since before the last price increase, and in that time, In that same period, we also rolled the wireless module into NPM at no charge. We also made pollers for modules free. Most importantly, we have added quite a bit of functionality, and we've expanded the engineering team, so the pace of change continues to increase.
Regarding the versions, we may just have to disagree on what a version is. If you're only counting the "left of dot" releases as a version, then I suppose you're right. But as one of the people who decides on our numbering, I can assure you that we don't count it that way because a ".1" can pack just as big a punch as an "x.0" release. The choice of numbering is an attempt to communicate something about the release, but it's definitely a mix of art, science, and marketing.
We raised prices in December 2006 specifically so that we could invest more in the product. Before that, the engineering team was a "Simpson's handful" of engineers (i.e., no need for the fifth finger) and progress was very slow. In December 2006, we shipped 8.0. Since this we have released 8.0.1, 8.0.2, 8.1, 8.5, 8.5.1, 9.0, 9.1, 9.5, 9.5.1, and we are about to release 10.0. And we expect another major release later this year. That's what we mean by about twice a year.
We'd hate to lose you as a customer. There's a lot of good stuff in 10.0. I hope you try it when it releases...soon. We've made a lot of process changes to ensure that the upgrade goes smoothly. And the release in the second half of the year will be just a feature-packed, if not more so.
If you'd like to talk about it more, please send me a private message, and we'll be happy to discuss at length.
