I would rate the pricing as two out of five.

Microsoft never sells Service Manager alone. In order to sell Service Manager, we need to take the entire System Center family, including the testing system, client management system, the monitoring System, and the virtual machine management system. It's a big family, and Service Manager is one component in this family.

Microsoft forces the customer to purchase the whole family in order to use one component.

The solution offers good productivity at a low price point.

The pricing is reasonable.

It comes free with the enterprise agreement that we have, but the expense really is in having to buy another product to sit on top of it to make it work properly. You wind up having to buy additional support and additional products with their own support and maintenance costs on top of that.

The license for SCSM is cheap.

This solution uses the Microsoft licensing model. We pay every three years. The license includes support.

It is an amazing solution but the pricing could be improved to be a little more competitive.  

The licensing costs are very tricky. As far as I know, it is very tricky for all people involved in using or reselling systems center — and sometimes it confused me. It is easy to recognize that in the earlier stages, the licensing scheme was different. Now you pay for the infrastructure level. You have to pay based on the processor and core. The requirements changed to eight cores for the infrastructure. Then if you need the tech support it is extra as part of the license. In my situation, I do not want to have the support contract from Microsoft because the partner will do support for me. So even to this point, the licensing is sometimes a little complex rather than straightforward. 

The conditions of the license depend upon the number of items in the infrastructure, but that is only one part of the agreement. That would be how many servers or how many instances are need to deploy based on the actual scenario and configuration. They increase the license cost according to individual situations based on how many devices need to be monitored. The products themselves come in a bundle, which is easy. You need to just purchase the desired package for the products. But licensing is actually not as simple as just picking the package of products. If I get the products in one of the bundled licensing schemes, I will get those products. But for the products, I need to buy additional licenses. So there are a lot of factors that drive the final license cost.

By comparison, VMware — and with many other products — licensing can be very straightforward. But this is not the case for Microsoft SCSM.

The solution does charge for add-ons and third party installations most of the time.

The price of the solution could be better. My organization has an enterprise annual license with Microsoft which provides us support.

It is an expensive solution.

It is a lower price vs. other things on the market.