ColdFusion 8 is out. Get ready to break out your wallets - the price apparently went up and there is some uproar about Adobe’s ongoing overseas pricing…
While I don’t think the pricing impacts large corporations (much) - I do think it impacts smaller companies. Where I previously worked we had 3 CF servers - one internal development server, and two production servers. To upgrade we would be looking at almost $12,000!
I was curious if Adobe has considered ‘a la carte’ pricing?
For enterprises - they could continue to buy the all-in-one bundle - but smaller shops could buy a ‘base’ which simply offered the core CF functionality. Then they could purchase ‘add-ons’ to provide the functionality they needed. At our shop - we used to send out a lot of email - so it would have been great to have a box just dedicated to email - using the new cfthread and the high volume email capabilities. That box would NOT need PDF, graphics or reporting capabilities. If you did a lot of reports - you could build a box around that functionality - removing things like Exchange integration and event gateways.
I’m excited to move to ColdFusion 8 - though I haven’t heard any talk of moving yet here at work. It will be interesting to see the adoption rate of CF8, and if people consider moving to BlueDragon or even newer offerings like Railo?
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We always buy subscriptions with our new servers and renew them every 2 years. We get more than our money back from them.
They offer the free developer edition for you to develop/test on, I thought. Is the license wrong?
@Sammy - they do offer a develop edition - where I worked before - we had a ‘development/staging’ server setup that clients, etc could access - and in that case - the ‘developer edition’ wasn’t sufficient (limited IPs).
Ahh, I see. I thought the IPs were dynamic though - as in only 2 IPs at any given time, not 2 specific IPs. It was just an assumption though - I’ve never tried it.
Instead, when we need a customer to check something out, we normally just deploy to the production server under a different URL or directory that the real production code/site.
Developer Edition is designed for local development… not for staging a production application. The IP restriction is the localhost, plus the first 2 IPs to connect between server restarts.
Hope that helps!
Jason
By the way, we have considered A la Carte pricing… but there are a few issues. How do you sell a shrink-wrapped box with a la carte? Just sell the basic set and then have people buy add-ons? Then, the cost to manage that approach prohibitive… and a lot of customers have to deal with purchasing approvals… getting those for each major feature would really suck… Also, when we have tried to introduce A la Carte pricing (remember Reporting with CF7…), there was tremendous pushback from the community. People want to just buy a server with all the fixins… and I agree… it makes it easier and cheaper for everyone.
If you have no other reason to upgrade than performance… then check out the performance!
http://www.adobe.com/products/.....ebrief.pdf
Cheers!
Jason
Jason - thank for the feedback! Luckily I’m no longer in a position to purchase software so I don’t have to make the big decisions!
Well there’s always this http://www.smithproject.org/
Open source CFML engine. One I think I will be exploring at some point in the future for ‘poorer’ clients.
A la carte….are you mad? CF developers are complaining about the price of a product most of them will never need to use (enterprise) - can you imagine asking them to pay in multiples for the stuff they do?
Cheers,
Davo