Some vendors protested the scenario we set forth for pricing purposes, but we feel sticking to a scenario is the only way to do an apples-to-apples comparison. And, by going through the price dance with vendors, we sometimes uncover gotchas that you'll be able to avoid. Not that extracting price is a completely painful process. For example, vendors generally honor our requirement that they provide straight MSRP pricing. This protects their negotiating position with their channels and with you. But every now and then, no matter how hard we strive to make the playing field level, we catch heat from all sides.
This was one of those times. Our pricing conundrum extended even to HP OpenView because of its advanced trans-nTier transaction tracking. To understand why, consider that all the other products track nTier performance by measuring each tier separately and then, when there's a problem, the tier at fault is flagged through a failure registered by the monitor of the failing tier. But because HP can monitor each tier, starting with the Web server, without having to run robotic transactions to each tier, it didn't need as many separate synthetic transactions as did all the other products. Again, our pricing scenario forced all the vendors to price for measurement from 100 locations, each monitoring 10 elements, a significant increase to HP's price.
In this case, we asked for a single out-the-door price. We explained our interest in servicing multiple constituencies to draw together IT and business interests. We prodded vendors to include any professional services that would be needed. And because most of the vendors charge based on the number and type of infrastructure elements monitored, we came up with a list of what we needed monitored. We assumed a distributed network that would benefit from 100 distributed robotic agents and 1,000 passive monitoring agents.
Some of the products are suites, like those from NetIQ, CA, HP and Concord, with optional pricing for various modules, like network monitoring. Empirix and ProactiveNet pretty much bundle everything but are designed and priced to track critical-path and backbone network devices, not entire networks.
For the vendors that don't offer separate network-monitoring options or portals, pricing didn't line up initially because fully monitoring the size network we indicated required network-management products. We believe all the vendors did their best to fully disclose pricing, but your mileage is likely to vary considerably. As one vendor said, "Serious discounting kicks in when you're at this level."
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