Axapta pricing evolution

I must admit to being puzzled by the strategy being followed by Microsoft in this domain.

When the Damgaard brothers introduced the product in 98, there were 3 different price tiers with level 1 being limited to 10 concurrent users, the next level pricing AOS's expensively, and the last fully fledged pricing everything including a large qty of AOS's.

Each level basically changed the price by about 20% that is if Level 1 is 100 Level 2 would be 120 and 3 144 or thereabouts.

When Navision was brought into the mix they tried to space out the products, that is they stopped the small version and upped the price by about 15-20% because of Navision pricing which is much more complicated with many "Granules" or feature ticking purchase options.

When Microsoft came in they upped the price again, and now seem to want to do so again.

In the old days as a reseller of the product we often used the metric of a per seat price, which is the project cost divided by the people using the product.

I have re-done some analysis on the latest numbers and a 10-20 concurrent user system with production and full trade finance now has a price tag almost 3 times the software price it had in 2001 which to me is basically prohibitive for sales.

I know that Spain and Certain other countries have managed to maintain the SBE or small business edition in their price list for a very long time I have not really taken care to find out whether this is still the case but basically the message from microsoft is that a project below 50 conurrent users is a no go as we are now 2-3 times more expensive on the licence in this area as compared to My SAP which practices a seat price.

Of course it is difficult to compare the prices as SAP is named user and not concurrent user, and also they are hungry for market share so they do "crazy" deals, also MS has introduced a per seat price on a "dumbed down" configuration basically you either choose no production and limited SCM functionality or severly limited production functionality or the old price list.

What would I like to see from MS, a coherent strategy that allows for sales to smaller (in concurrent users) customers, this is being tried with the per user pricing initiative, however the functionality included is too meagre and the choices are to restrictive.

With the pricing in the current state you can only afford as a customer to buy if you are part of a group, or have a very large centralized installation to do, otherwise the cost is prohibitive.

I believe this is a problem as I believe that where Axapta (Dynamics Ax) really would shine is exactly in that market place of smaller installations in the 20-50 concurrent user range. Just a quick reminder 25 concurrent users is enough to do all sales, finance and production controlling for a production organisation of 200-300 people sometimes even more depending upon the industry, these can be quite sizeable companies.

Axapta is very affordable for organisations that have 1000 users accross a large number of sites, the problem in these scenarios is that the support for and the knowledge of how to do things is scarce, and the product is not functionality wise made to cover all the needs of such sizeable companies.

There are any number of functional areas where the product has the functionality but it does not have in depth functionality, rather there is vennier or a frame work upon which one could build or expand.

This is an issue as the dealers are being slowly killed by the pricing strategy, which seems very tame coming from Microsoft, I had thought that the advent of Microsoft on the product would mean 2 things:

Loads of great marketing

Agressive market driven pricing that is cabled to take a maximum of market share

Neither have frankly been visible at least in the markets where I have been active.

I hope that Microsoft will adress these issues in the near future.

/Sven