Pull to the cloud
by Volker Weber
As I was investigating pricing for BES12 in the cloud, which just became available, I once again wondered about this:
The pricing and licensing options for BES12 are the same whether you choose to deploy on premise or in the cloud.
BES12 is licensed per device and year, starting from $23 all the way up to $90, depending on the services and support level you want. (German pricing here.) You can use BlackBerry's servers in the cloud, or you can download the free server software, lease your own server hardware, provision it in your data center, license the operating system, pay your systems administrator, and on top of that pay the same price as you do when running it in the cloud.
In essence: when you license the software, you get the service for free. And that's not only BlackBerry. I see other vendors doing the same.
I believe this pricing scheme, deploy on premises or in the cloud for the same price, will create a big pull. It's going to be difficult for IT to defend their servers. There are quite a few reasons to run your BES12 on premises: secure connectivity behind the firewall, ActiveSync gatekeeping and more. But what's really telling are the free trials. 30 days in the cloud, 60 days on-premises. You just need those extra 30 days to even get started.
Comments
I still see incredibly strong resistance towards cloud offerings, especially by US companies (which basically means almost all of them) due to data protection and privacy laws. I’m honestly puzzled as to the reason why no-one has addressed this properly yet. Amazon has taken a first step with its Frankfurt-based data center. If they founded a German company in addition to that, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with good reasons why they should be considered any different to IBM. Until then …
(Of course I meant “offerings by US companies”, not “resistance by US companies”.)
My humble observation:
Step one: there are (valid) concerns
Step two: money makes the cloud go around
