It’s always been my philosophy that we should make it as easy as possible for our prospects to write us checks. Sounds flippant, but I believe it is sound business philosophy.
It’s been interesting to me to see how customers have wanted to buy infrastructure software, and how it has changed over the years.
Back in the ’90s and early 2000’s, most network management vendors charged for their software per interface or per port, and we did as well. Around 2004 and 2005, we started receiving requests for device-based pricing, since it was difficult for end users to know just how many interfaces they had (but they knew how many devices were in inventory). So we acquiesced, and converted to device based pricing. To do this, you need to make assumptions about the average number of ports per networking device (or interfaces per Bladeserver, etc.).