|
by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Enterprise application license discounts, sometimes deep, are still out there. But as manufacturers hold onto releases longer, they realize there's much more to holding down software costs than low license fees. |
Last year, Salvatore Emma began searching for a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for medical device manufacturer Arrhythmia Research Technology Inc. after top executives decided that ART's aging software could no longer support its growth-through-acquisition strategy. After narrowing down an original list of five potential vendors to three whose software had the functionality that ART needed, Emma's team began to talk price. "We told them we wanted to avoid the typical used-car sales approach, where they start with an artificially high price, then we go back and forth before agreeing on the real price," says Emma, ART's director of IT. Instead, two of the three vendors started with high prices, which they later negotiated down. One of those, Emma says, proposed a price of $840,000 for software and implementation services before eventually agreeing to $260,000, a discount of nearly 70%. [Click to continue] |