[sk1ppy]

Their pricing was based on application instances and the list price was ludicrous (several hundred dollars) but most companies got good discounts.

The thing that bothered me with the model was it disincentives modern microservice architectures. One big monolith cost less than lots of smaller components.

It may have changed since I last saw the details.

[zapita]

This is still the case. Even after enterprise discounts, the pricing is outrageously high. I know of at least one well-known enterprise customer where IT has mandated a company-wide "get off Pivotal" policy because TCO is just too damn high.

I hope for Pivotal's sake that the eye-popping price is not crucial to their growth forecast. If it is, I think 2019-20 will be difficult for them. They just don't have the market share to force these prices down customer's throats.

[bigiain]

They tell us there that 319 customers paid $259 million between them in fiscal 2018 - so on average each customer pays $800k/year. They'll have outliers in both directions from that average - But my gut feel is they probably don't have many customers spending less that $80k/year. (Same as I'll bet there's not too many $8mill+/year ones).

[zapita]

Account size and pricing are two different things.

The question is: are the $800k customers getting good value for that subscription, or are they looking at projected costs and thinking "we better switch to a competitor before this gets out of hand".

[bigiain]

The YoY growth rates suggest they're at least capable of convincing new business that it's good value.

(Though in enterprise sales, even amazingly poor vendors often get to re-bill for several years, until the exec who signed off on the subscription moves on and it becomes politically possible for people internally to admit to each other it was a stupid decision to sign up in the first place... So perhaps 2 years growth here is only telling the "sales capability" side of the story, not the "ongoing value provided" side...)

[zapita]

Right, that's what I've witnessed anecdotally: strong ability to sell, usually as part of a top-down "digital transformation" project with tons of agile development consulting and multi-year sales cycle; then a few years of abysmal results, covered up by the project sponsors, then eventually a purge once the sponsoring exec is replaced.

[bigiain]

Heh - exactly.

And the other similar version: tightly fought procurement between two opposing vendors with different internal "sponsors". Winning vendor's ability to deliver is stymied at every opportunity by losing sponsor or their internal supporters. Then the few years of abysmal results happens in spite of winning vendors capability and efforts - same outcome plays out.