About the CF 8 Price IncreaseTo Adobe and their defenders in regards to the ColdFusion price hike. Despite your assumptions to the contrary, those of us complaining about the price increase are not whiny brats. We do have a legitimate greivance to bring. Let me try to explain the perspective I'm coming from. I work for a small development house. We build websites - NOT webservices or specific apps that fit into a larger corporate IT infrastructure - a single website for a small-to-medium-sized company, usually with several very small apps conglomerated together. An Ecommerce site, for example, is our bread and butter. A typical project for us is around $35-50k, and is completed within a month or two - planning to deployment. Obviously, we do this several times a year, usually to different customers each time. So to win the contract, we have to compete not only on quality, but on price. These sites are typically just large enough in terms of traffic to require a two-server web farm with a third server as the SQL back-end. This is a typical set-up. Up until now, we've been able to compete with our .NET and PHP-based competitors, because, although their costs were significantly cheaper for the hardware, our development time was significantly shorter, offsetting the CF licenses that we had to include in the project cost. It has been very difficult to sell licenses of Enterprise, because it increases the overall project cost by $7400, and the only benefit we can really give non-technical people is "It's really better to use Enterprise if you have more than one server" That doesn't sell well, and usually their response is to just use Standard with some third-party or MS-based load-balancing and failover solution. However, this solution isn't very good, and the failures are then blamed on ColdFusion, thus making future sales even more difficult. With this new price hike, you've sealed any chance we had of selling Coldfusion in this multi-server scenario. There's no way we can tack on $15,000 to a $35,000 project and make up for that in development time. You've priced us out of competition with .NET and PHP. Frankly, I'm not sure who you think your competing with if you think this is a reasonable sum to ask us to swallow. I've read and can appreciate your problems with the larger-sized projects. And I think the thread-throttle thing is a good solution to that. I have no issue with that restriction. I think what we need is three tiers. One free or nearly so to compete on the low end mom-and-pops, one middle tier priced around 2 or 3 grand for those of us in the middle, and Enterprise for the top end with all doors unlocked and J2EE integration, etc. Perhaps all this noise is not because the price is too high, but because you've opened a hole in your pricing plan, and those of us in that range are falling into it. |
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You're phrasing it so that with CF8, it costs your client $15k more to use the Enterprise edition. But this isn't the case, it's just $3k. Yesterday it cost $12k (I think it was $6k each) to buy two licenses, today it is $15k to buy two Enterprise licenses. Only a difference of $3k, so up your bid to $38k. Or if you've been deploying the same feature set over and over again streamline the process by $3k.
But even then, that shouldn't matter. You shouldn't be losing profit margins because of the rise in the cost of CF8. If a line item on the bid now costs $3k more, your bid should increase by $3k or you're bidding wrong.
Finally - add some features to your products that are now available in CF8 and show them what they're getting for their money. If you're simply going to continue to sell them all the previous features and never take advantage of what CF8 has, then yes - it is a raw deal for your customers.
I think I see your confusion. The scenario I'm referring to is a competitive bidding situation against other companies that are using PHP or .NET. In a perfect world, yes, I could just tack on my expenses and the client would always pay whatever I asked. But that's not the world I live in. If I'm offering the same feature set (defined by the client by the way), but my competitors are $3,000 less than me, I've lost the contract. Up until now, it has been difficult to compete, but because I could save labor costs in development time, the bids would be about equal. But to win the bid, I have to meet the same price as my competitros, so, yes, this extra $3k does come out of my pocket.
And the $15k number is the number I have to sell the client to upgrade to Enterprise from Standard. When it was $12, it was an extremely hard sell. Now, forget about it.
I haven't looked into Railo much. I've not yet found a hardware load-balancer that does what I need for less than $15k, at which point, I could just buy Enterprise. That's not an exhaustive search, by any means - preliminary at best, and I'm not a hardware-guy, so I'm not particularly qualified to know what's good or not.
I see the pain you're going through, and it would have been great if enterprise came down by 1500, instead of going up - although that still may not have helped you out.
I'm still trying to work out the scenario, so maybe you can educate me further. With ASP / PHP, do they come with some out of the box load balancer solution that I've never heard about? If not, does the load balancer work better with ASP/PHP? If so, that would be a serious CF bug! If not however, I don't see how either of them would have an advantage in this regard. Maybe you can post back with details, like I said, I'm just unaware in this regard.
I'm not sure if this helps you or not, but the performance results from CF8 look fantastic - possibly that will save you needing a dual-server solution? That would give you a nice edge on the competition, if that worked out.
I'm sure you know of the free solutions already - BlueDragon is one - but you're going to lose some functionality, well, the new CF8 ones, anyway. That, of course, is why we have to pay for CF!
I don't think it's fair for you to be painted as a whiny brat, you have legitimate issues with the pricing. Obviously, if you were able to offer the enterprise features to your clients at standard prices, you would BLOW the competition away. THAT is a great point to make.
While I'm not trying to defend Adobe in this regard, I see their point of view. Enterprise software with enterprise features are expensive to make and expensive to buy. ASP / PHP don't offer these features for free, so I can only see the barrier being the cost of standard (you also mention "their costs were significantly cheaper for the hardware" - did you mean software, or are there cheaper hardware costs for these deployments also?)
Cheers,
David
Cheers,
David
heh. right. sorry to both Dave and David. :)
You're right that PHP and ASP, in and of themselves, don't have the software-based load-balancer built in. However, I think it can be said, though I can't back it up specifically, that both .NET and PHP integrate much better with their perpective OS'es (assuming CF and .NET on Windows and PHP on Apache), and so might be better able to tie-in to software load-balancers in that regard - specifically with sharing sessions. I'm particularly ignorant of the Anyone-But-Microsoft side of things, but the impression I get is that it can be done without too much pain in a software implementation.
Now, Dave Shuck has pointed me toward the Coyote POint line-up, which was a pleasant surprise. (Thanks, Dave), and in the future, I think I can make that into a workable solution, but it is still a work-around to the much better solution of having that load-balancing (and distinctly important) fail-over integrated with the CF server engine itself.
For example, as I understand it, the Enterprise version of CF uses CF-based performance indicators to decide which server should handle the next request, and also uses internal metrics to decide when a server isn't responding correctly, and should fail-over to the other one.
This is an excellent way to handle this problem. And again, my main concern here is not performance, but redundancy and up-time. Plus, it's my belief that using tools the way they're designed to be used is usually better than finding an outside substitute. CF is already designed to handle this. Why not use it?
Let me clarify again. I'm perfectly willing to pay for the features that I need. A $3,000 middle-tier version of CF with these non-Enterprise features would be welcome, and I'd happily pay for it. The problem is that Adobe is trying to appeal to the WebSphere and BEALogic customers, and that's how they're defining "Enterprise" - as dozens of servers acting in concert dedicated to one large-scale application. That's not me, so why should I have to pay for J2EE deployment and Oracle drivers when all I really want to do is wire two servers together and have them actually be aware of each other?
If nothing else makes sense to you, consider this. CF Standard is $1300. Enterprise is $7500. considering nothing else, doesn't a 500% increase in price seem like an inordinate jump with no intermediate places to stop along the way? How can one possibly grow to make that jump? You have two choices. Be an Enterprise-level company before you buy ColdFusion, or outgrow ColdFusion Standard before you have grown large enough to afford Enterprise.
This is my objection. I think ColdFusion Enterprise should be priced at $10,000 or more. Compete with those upper end Enterprise solutions. Get more large companies using ColdFusion, and thus more programmers using it, and thus more money for future advances etc. But there needs to be a middle tier that meets the needs of small apps served by 2-5 servers, and priced accordingly.
P.S. Server monitoring is likewise clearly not an Enterprise-only feature. That more than anything else feels like a stick in the side.
Is it in the same class as Websphere Portal or even Websphere?
Is .NET 2.0 or 3.0 NOT Enterprise?
As mentioned before, increasing licensing costs by 500 percent is astronomical to move from Standard to Enterprise.
Talking is always good! I think Adobe could have done a better job explaining the differences between Enterprise and Standard with something better than "limited". I've had the opportunity to since be a part of a presentation with Tim Buntel, and had some clarification on the matter.
(Full, if not belated disclosure, I manage the CT CFUG: www.cfugitives.com)
One specific is that while the Server Monitor is enterprise "only", it's really not - only the Flex app is additional. You still have access to the API's, and what's more, you can take the SWF from enterprise, run it locally (I think) and 'point' it to monitor your production server - I may be explaining it wrong, but i think that is what Tim said last night. I'm sure more will come out in the blogosphere - I intend to look at that myself.
I guess my point is, how many people know that? Too many people have been complaining about the single thread for certain features, because they thought they weren't going to get all the new features. That wasn't true, but no one really communicated that.
I see your point about failover and load balancing. We have enterprise here but we still use a hardware load balancer - my network guys said we had to, and that CF really doesn't handle load balancing (I'm not entirely sure the hardware does a better job, but thats another story). I could be wrong there.
It's obvious that Adobe is trying to compete with WebSphere and BEA - enterprise includes JRUN - Not too sure how successful they will be in this regard. IBM absolutely MUST sell their J2EE product, I'm not sure Adobe has that kind of focus on its development platform (as opposed to design tools).
Wait, What am I trying to say? I see your point! I think you make a good one, and I think it's unfortunate that Adobe isn't supporting you in this regard. Work arounds are never good. I *think* if you presented all of this to Adobe, they may say what I said - you are on a level playing field with standard and ASP/PHP, and the price difference is made up for in productivity, yada, yada, yada. That's not much help though.
I wish Adobe would come out and clarify some matters - in your instance I don't think it would solve your problems, but silence always makes things worse. I'll be at MAX this year, and I'll bring this matter up at the BOF sessions - maybe this could be changed for CF 9?
Cheers,
David
I *think* Adobe would tell you that it's the inclusion of JRUN (their J2EE solution), and server management that makes it "enterprise". WebSphere is more of a brand name at this stage. There is a J2EE server product, and then there are plenty of add on products, such as the portal you mentioned, e-commerce suites, etc. That's my limited knowledge of the matter.
.Net isn't enterprise in the same class, however, MS achieves what WebSphere does with its Windows Server technology (again, I'm not an expert in that matter).
So, in all regards, I think the branding is misleading, ColdFusion the language isn't enterprise, but the J2EE platform, and what you can do with it, is (according to Adobe).
Anyone, please feel free to correct me!
Cheers,
David
I understand what you're saying, however I find it a surprising perspective that .NET isn't enterprise in the same class as ColdFusion.
You also mentioned that Adobe might be trying to compete with Websphere, but I've got to say that ColdFusion doesn't even come close to commanding the respect that Websphere does (deserved or not) in any discussion about enterprise solutions that I've been privy to.
I really think Adobe's lost opportunity is on not providing a robust integrated development platform including an IDE. I don't think raising the price is going to make the product any more enterprisey, and without some serious marketing (hey, no CF 8 is here! banner after 50 refreshes on the Adobe home page), ColdFusion is going to continue to not garner the respect it may deserve.
You never explained why CF Standard wouldn't fit your situation...... from your description it doesn't sound like you need Enterprise at all, so why are you whining?
@Brian
> If you are on Windows servers, you can use their built-in load balancing for nothing. Why not do that?
I've tried Windows NLB. For one thing, it doesn't have sticky sessions, so you're stuck either trying to put persistent variables in the client scope, or re-architecting your app to not use session(type) data. NLB also does not detect your CF server going down, thus no real fail-over. If the whole server stops responding to a ping request, it will detect that, but if JRun hangs, for instance, it won't redirect traffic away from it. In my experience, NLB is actually less effective than just Round-Robin DNS.
>If all you're using CF Enterprise for is the load balancing that seems like a pretty crazy waste of money.
Yeah, that's my point. CF has the capability built in for reasonable small-business-type load-balancing and failover. And it's done very intelligently, yet for some reason, this is deemed "Enterprise" functionality, and you have to cough up $7500 per server to get it.
"Enterprise" is a bit of a marketing stance. Yes, .Net is enterprise strength, if it's powered by the right server software.
You're right, WebSphere is way ahead in the recognition stakes - it's also WAY ahead in its price range. I think this may be part of the reason for the price increase in CF Enterprise.
It really depends on how much Adobe pushes this, but I can't imagine for a minute that their development platform is nearly as important as their design tools. We'll see though.
Cheers,
David
The same goes for the failover. The cluster supports a Generic Script resource type. Hire a good VB programmer for one day to come in and write a simple script you can place on all the CF servers. It will checks that the CF service is up and running and that it is returning the expected results (I would create a simple test page that just returns a simple value that the script can check). This would not require a lot of code, and a good VB guy could whip this out in a couple of hours. Again, this would only have to be done once, and the savings of not having to buy CF Enterprise would offset the cost immediately.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that with a little bit of effort up front, you would avoid having to buy CF Enterprise on all of your future projects and save yourself a ton of money.
I share your frustration. CF developers take at LOT of grief. Just look at the Digg posts and all the negative press that CF gets. Also, as a CF Developer I am really getting *sick* of defending CF.
I *love* CF. I have programed in a bunch of languages ASP, PHP, C#, VB, PERL and now I am learning Java, but I always go back to CF for all the obvious reasons.
But a man can only take so much. Like you said on my blog, "It's fear of obsolescence".
Here are the facts. No sane hosting company is going to offer CF with out being able to lock down users ability to reek havoc. Configurable SUI wrappers have been around for ages and you can't get it on Adobe's CF with out spending $7,000. That means hosting companies will either have to disable certain tags wholesale (like CFfile, thus prohibiting image uploads) or nut up $7,000 in order to offer CF hosting. That means that a LOT of hosting companies will not be offering CF or not upgrading.
Right now I have a *SERIOUS* case of FUD concerning my career as a CF developer. I am actually pissed off about Adobe's pricing. I went from overjoyed (I was PUMPED about CF 8 coming out) to a "pissed off WTF" in a matter of 72 hours after the reality sunk in.
Mind you I am a CF die hard and have been since 97. I am very passionate about web development and am one of those guys that can talk about it for hours on end. But I have smarts outside the realm of computers and I can see thewriting on the wall, and it does not read well.
Take this recent addition to the wikipedia entry for CF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion
"ColdFusion skills are harder to find because ColdFusion market share is in decline[citation needed] Using ColdFusion that must be maintained therefore presents a risk to IT management."
That is right: Using ColdFusion... presents a risk to IT management.
Like I said, a man can only take so much. I am learning Java now....
FUD happens! First of all, the wiki quote you gave us makes no sense. If the install base for CF was going down, there would be a glut of CF developers, and the supply would be greater than the demand. CF skills ARE in demand and ARE hard to get - but that's not because people are dumping it.
OK, let's get some facts:
Truth is (and I have this on good authority) the install base of ColdFusion is rising, and has been for a number of years now.
ColdFusion hosting has not been a problem so far, and there's no reason to think it will be going forward. For all your hypothesis about what hosting companies will/will not do - they DO offer CF hosting.
While Jeremy has a specific situation where he cannot integrate CF enterprise into his solutions, the truth is, CF Enterprise is a cheap J2EE enterprise solution. A part of my job (managing the App Dev team) is keeping up on alternatives. The likes of WebSphere are nearly 3 times the cost of CF enterprise, and you STILL don't get the productivity or feature set of CF. Guys, I hate to break this to you, but CF 8 enterprise is cheap (granted, that's a relative term).
I really don't know what writing you are reading on you wall, but I see good stuff on mine. Come on! All of the features that roll right out of the box? Forget the FUD, in fact, don't. Hit right back at it. MS? Open Source? Like THEY don't have problems? We hear about a security flaw in MS solutions, what, once a week? "Yes sir, I'll put our most sensitive information right out there on this wintel". And PHP? Some PHP'er was over on Sam Farmers blog criticizing his post on the 10 best CF one-liners. Can anyone give me 10 PHP one-liners? I mean, what can you do with one line in PHP? OK, a comment. An incomplete comment, at that.
C'mon, thicken up that skin. They MUST resort to these tactics because they CANNOT compete with us, pound for pound. First they dismiss us, then they ridicule us, then, we win. Or, FUD, for short.
Cheers,
Davo
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