Software prices set to tumble to one tenth of today’s prices?

Manufacturing enterprise software (ERP) is far too expensive, and vendors of it need to be rethinking their pricing models from the ground up – or face the consequences. So says Ian Skinner, charismatic chairman of fledgling independent IT company Astute Software. At last month’s Softworld Show at the NEC, the firm launched Java components-based financial and supply chain (sales order processing, stock control, inventory management, warehouse management, etc) applications – with a revolutionary unlimited user perpetual licenses fee of £100,000 for corporates. For organisations currently paying per seat license fees of £2,000—5,000 and wanting to roll out supply chain software across multiple sites and multiple users, that could easily amount to one tenth of today’s prices. Says Skinner: “We are issuing a challenge to the industry to throw away the software licensing book and adopt a licensing strategy that both complements a global Internet strategy and encourages significant deployments of software seats to empower organisations to exchange information across multiple suppliers, customers and partners.” He continues: “Our perpetual licensing strategy benefits both the reseller and customer by giving the reseller more control over his software pricing and the customer sufficient software levels to satisfy the growth of his business.” The suites have already found success with nine users in the UK and Europe. And working with European partners including Compuserve, Roundhouse and ESG, the firm looks set to make quite an impact on the market. The company now says it will target SMEs through VARs (providing a configuring service), software developers as modules and a toolkit and to businesses direct if they have a capable IT department. Says Skinner: “We stop at BoMs (bills of materials): we’re on the supply side at the moment; not the manufacturing itself. But in the end there’ll be a catalogue of modular software.