The pricing has been fair.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, we have the annual maintenance fee because we purchased the hardware from SevOne.

We have a procurement team who goes through the licensing. I don't get involved with the pricing.

There are different options available for licensing, with the per-device option being more expensive but more flexible. If the company has a sufficient budget then I would recommend using a per-device license. Although it is more expensive, it is better because it saves time. However, if you already have other servers or solutions in place that perform the same function, and you don't have the requirement on a per-device level, then the per-object license is a better choice, as long as you know the exact number that you need.

There is separate licensing and pricing for the support, which also has different options available. We opted to purchase the standard, business hours support. 

Many tools price things based on the number of KPIs that you're collecting around a device. In many cases, there could be hundreds of metrics that you need to collect. SevOne provides device-level pricing. That gives us the flexibility to turn on, and expand on, the metrics that we're collecting around those devices, without taking a financial hit.

As with any vendor tool, having a good commercial contract is part of what makes the tool successful, and we got a lot of value out of it very quickly because we were able to secure a good commercial arrangement. It lived up to everything else that SevOne claimed on the box. So we were able to get the value straight away. 

Every vendor's licensing model is different. SevOne took quite a bit of exploration to understand the license. But if a customer is looking at it, just to understand what they're getting into in terms of managed objects and what counts towards a managed object, then they'll be fine. They'll know what they're up for and you don't get any surprises when it comes to buying additional licenses. The last thing you want to do is invest in a tool and then find out that there are ongoing incremental costs as you add more. My advice would be to secure a good deal upfront at a good price and then it becomes more attractive within the business to sell it.

We have ongoing support and maintenance, so that's an annual OPEX for us, but that's very reasonably priced. If we look at the total cost of ownership of SevOne to our previous toolsets, then SevOne still comes out way ahead by comparison.

Although I don't have exact details in terms of cost, my experience has been that SevOne is willing to make a deal with the customer. They are certainly not pricing themselves out of the market. There is lots of room for negotiation in terms of pricing, in terms of components, and things like that.

For the value that you get from SevOne, it's worth the price. There are a lot of cheaper alternatives on the market, and even free options. But they require more staff, more resources, and engineers with more advanced knowledge of monitoring. That's what makes SevOne worth the price.

In addition to the standard costs, we pay for support. And because we have installations in a number of countries, especially in Europe, there are additional costs for the installations in those regions, costs that are based on the different forms of taxes. If you just have an installation in one location, the cost structure is straightforward.

Some of the services and functionality are adapted for SevOne via open-source, and the cost is very high. For the price that they are asking, it cannot be justified.

If the vendor can look into reducing the cost, and then have a different licensing model based on the usage, that would really help. A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved. If the cost were lowered or alternatively, if they can split it over several years, for example, that would help to get the product in the door and get going.

I don’t recall that we had a hard cost other than the license/purchase, it was soft costs (OpEx labor) and we haven't worked those out, as they are ongoing. We have one employee that spends about 80% of his time working on the platform today. We have two 40K pollers, two HA units, two 10K units with one HA, three VPAS, and one DNC flow collector. So roughly $50,000 in labor annually.

The license was quite expensive in the old days, but I think the price is okay for an enterprise customer. However, SevOne is still more costly than competitors in the small or medium-sized enterprise market. 

Be careful of how the licensing works. From the administration side of things, I am a propeller head. I do not know anything that has a dollar sign in it. Those are numbers I do not know.

SevOne has a decent pricing model, so far, for production & solutions on the shelf. Given the “object” licensing concept, it simplifies the pricing model in many ways, and gives flexibility for customer to decide.

Thoroughly evaluate what needs to be monitored from SevOne, you’ll look at it as a different ball game for the cost of what needs to be monitored.

The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing.

The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product.

From the operator’s point of view, it is quite painful to have to remember that every device costs us some cash if added to SevOne (CAPEX and, later, yearly OPEX).

Prices per license are not huge, but they exist.

It is very visible when we connect a big number of network devices (due to some new company acquisition). At once, we have to connect 100s of network elements, and it is hard to find extra money for that.

On the other hand, the existing model is very flexible from a financial point of view (pay-as-you-grow).

SevOne is usually spot-on with their scaling of an environment. Be sure that you tell them exactly what you want to monitor. Objects can grow quickly with each additional service you wish to monitor.

What made SevOne very attractive is that you pay as you go – you don’t need to buy something for $100,000 just to get started. You can start low and build up as you go and as you see how the product works. We started with $5,000 to $10,000 and, once you see that it works, you can jump in.

The level of price to functionality ratio is more balanced because, as an appliance it doesn't care about hardware or database that we would otherwise use. This directly helps SevOne engineers who are responsible for this, and avoid those areas that indicate there is a problem at the application, database or hardware level.

I can´t answer that.

Licensing costs can add up quickly, so know what you need to monitor and what you don’t.

We're managing it with one person so the cost is cheaper than some of our other tools.

The licensing is based upon a network element of a device. An element is a single SNMP entity. The product can be tailored to manage to the number of elements that are managed on a device. So start off by identifying what elements are required to be managed and base your licensing on that, allowing room for future growth.

This product needs a lot of handholding and close collaboration with network design resources, in terms of choosing the appliance and the number of licenses. Otherwise, SevOne may look like expensive, which it is not.

Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance.

I work on the technical side and have no insight into the purchasing side.

Have a bank of licenses, because it is about the number of objects (RAM, ports, CPU, etc.).