June 23, 2009
ParAccel pricing
As I noted in connection with ParAccel’s recent TPC-H filing, I think the whole exercise is basically an expensive joke. But one slightly useful spin-off is that ParAccel disclosed pricing. Specifically, ParAccel’s stated price in the disclosure document is:
- $100,000/TB license fee (user data). That’s like Vertica, although I don’t know whether ParAccel emulates Vertica’s policy of making test and development licenses free.
- 57% quantity discount at 30 terabytes. That’s not surprising.
- 1% annual maintenance fee (applied to the discounted price). That’s astounding.
Last year ParAccel quoted prices of $100,000/TB or $50,000/server. The latter figure would seem to have led to lower numbers on the benchmark configuration, so perhaps it’s no longer an option on ParAccel’s price list.
Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehousing, ParAccel, Pricing
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3 Responses to “ParAccel pricing”
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Man, I sure wish you’d do a whole post on pricing in this industry. It’s really all over the place (or maybe I’m just not getting it) but I suspect many people could use some of your insight on that issue. What does “per TB” really mean anyway? Are there finite ways to price in this market or is it really just all over the place or “à la tète du client” as we say in French?!? 🙂
A few huge problems in writing about pricing:
1. Quantity discounts are major. (Or negotiated prices.)
2. Quantity discounts are severe.
3. The mapping between TB of user data and hardware or storage is very imprecise.
4. Vendors aren’t particularly forthcoming, and even if one tried to get the info from users, each situation is different.
I do the best I reasonably can. 🙂
The only certain way to establish an accurate price and price/performance comparison is for the customer to run a competitive onsite POC based on the customers data and range of analysis and reporting workload, include data loading and transformation processes.
Most Vendors are resistant to this because getting performance isn’t easy for all vendors – this is highly visible in an onsite POC and so the true Total Cost of Ownership becomes the basis for the decision not a list price comparison per TB – which is as said above totally meaningless and a marketeers metric rather than a customer buying guideline.
The customers who include the POC step in their buying cycle will be best positioned to understand for their requirements the best vendor to choose. The value of getting away from the corporate slides and into execution with the vendor before you buy adds to the safety of the vendor decision. Its also an excellent tool for the customers’ procurement team – to ensure they negotiate the total cost of ownership over 5 years aspects – often overlooked or underplayed by vendors during the evaluation.
Hope this helps!