Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#271

Post by knightofmars » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #244

knightofmars wrote: post #240

These two sections call out the root of the problem. Both point to a lack of a holistic approach to managing an organization's software licenses. "According to research firm IDC, 60% of U.S. technology spending occurs outside companies’ IT department." ...and... "Many subscriptions, Christopher said, cost $8,000 or so a month—or about $100,000 a year. And it’s not uncommon, he added, for subscriptions costing $10,000…

And why is this a problem? In some cases it's more of a solution.

It may look like a solution to an individual or to a small group of people within a company. But the following reasons are examples why it may not be.

* paying double (more than one department paying for a SaaS product that would accommodate both under the cost being paid by one of the departments)

* failure to reduce cost via group purchasing (enterprise licensing usually goes down per user as the number of users goes up)

* using products that haven't been reviewed to handle special types of data (data being put into the application that shouldn't: financial, medical, etc)

* using products without hooking them into the single sign-on solution (users who leave the company may still have access to SaaS applications and company data if they aren't being properly administered)

* using products that require a trained administrator without having one actually trained and appointed

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#272

Post by cercatrova » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

davidajackson wrote: post #175

taleodor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Unfortunately, way too often I see execs saying "that's too expensive, we just have to do it manually" instead of using good tool. Then what happens is somebody making $100+/hour would spend several hours to do the job that would be covered by a tool that costs under $50/month.

Someone should build a webpage that does this: 1. Enter salary of engineer. 2. Enter cost per engineer of product (subscription, one time, etc.). 3. Enter required minutes to make worth your time (setup per employee can be factored in). This may already exist, but if it doesn't it could be a useful tool for Saas companies. Something you could drop into emails to potential customers ("see how much you would save"). Wo…

I've seen an app called Kanban Mail whose pricing page has such a simple calculator, although for individuals rather than companies,

https://kanbanmail.app/pricing

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#273

Post by thorwasdfasdf » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

and even if it is worth it, Why aren't they switching to equally good subscriptions that are cheaper? that's the real question.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#274

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

stiray wrote: post #245

JakeWesorick wrote: post #11

Lots of the SaaS products we use mean we don't have to hire more employees. So I'm not sure if dollars per employee is a meaningful stat.

Just an interesting idea, if no one wants to have employees (lets face it, they are a mess, they waste oxygen, they fart, producing CO2, are corona virus friendly, produce road accidents... and you need to pay them so they can live) maybe everyone is having wrong bussiness plan. Whole world should transform to produce only SAAS products for SAAS people as they are the only customers who will in long term still have m…

You've attached a sarcasm tag to your first paragraph, but I do think the market is actually going there. Notice how many products around you get replaced by services.

I don't like it at all.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#275

Post by rodgerd » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

Then someone gets Slack because they don't like Teams, and they think that's worth it. Someone else wants Flowdock. Your new exec used Zoom at his old job and wants everyone to have that for video calling. Your IT security team have half a dozen anti-virus tools, two data loss prevention tools, three monitoring solutions because they're overwhelmed by the amount of data coming out of them. You use a third party RAS solution that doesn't work as well as the one built into Windows, but boy does it add a chunk per-user. You're still running a few JVM applications which you now owe Oracle for the pleasure of using an old JRE. No-one uses the three knowledge management tools you've bought over the years to try and organize your documentation, but you can't decommission any of them yet, because you never migrated everything out of them.

Then someone in the finance team decides the way to tackle out-of-control costs is to buy a tool to monitor installed software on all the desktops. It has another agent.

Welcome to the swamp.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#276

Post by papito » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

genghisjahn wrote: post #93

papito wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most business in the United States is done despite the management, not because of it.

Where’s the list of awesome companies that succeed without managers?

You mean the companies where executives use extensive corporate speak and pull deadlines out of their asses, without checking in with the experts on the ground, triggering office heroics down in the trenches. We'll do it - we all get rent to pay.

Yeah, you can fake through it more than half of the time, comfortably. Just be eloquent, tall, and loud.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#277

Post by hyperpallium » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

Alternatives make it safer for buyers, maybe Sun's model: open spec, free reference implementation, and commercial version.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#278

Post by rodgerd » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

fludlight wrote: post #83

phkahler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, total cost would be a better measure since there is no per-person cost to the SaaS provider. If you have 10,000 employees that's $100M per year in expenses. If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time.

Rolling your own payroll is about as good an idea as rolling your own crypto.

It depends whether payroll theft is part of your business model, or something you're trying to avoid.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#279

Post by lowercased » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

armatav wrote: post #214

jariel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain." $200K is not a good benchmark for what companies spend. Median salary in the US is about $50K [1] Average overhead per/employee is 18-26% [2] So a $10K spend for 10% increase in productivity on someone earning about $60K ... is not a bargain. But there's a problem with this, because SaaS can be 1) Individual productivity 2) Operational produc…

Median salary for a software engineer in the US is not $50k... And the productivity increase using certain SaaS tools is not 10%, it can be an order of magnitude in certain instances. https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-... https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S... https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engin…

> And the productivity increase using certain SaaS tools is not 10%, it can be an order of magnitude in certain instances

well... my productivity isn't always increased, regardless of what tools someone wants to buy. and... sometimes it's a drain on my productivity, but using tool ABC increases someone else's productivity (at the expense of mine). How do you account for the productivity increase of -5% for 30% of your employees, but 20% for the other 70%?

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#280

Post by rodgerd » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

Reubachi wrote: post #194

optimiz3 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Valve done anything noteworthy in the last 10 years besides milking the Steam store? Their half-baked console seemed like an attempt to do more of the former.

Is this sarcasm? Steam has been the only consistent video game Cloud SAAS in the past 10 years.Can you name one time that the service was down without warning/proper recourse, had a data breach, exceeded SLAs, etc? Also, valve's ther ventures are....massively successful. The microtransaction model in gaming originated with Valve, and now the entire mobile and freemium gaming markets use that business model. So in thi…

> team has been the only consistent video game Cloud SAAS in the past 10 years.

Xbox Live.