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Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

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

#361

Post by TuringNYC »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #354
analog31 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for a typical office worker, based on my experience at a large company, there might be 10 to 20 enterprise apps that include: * Tracking work hours * Communicating within teams * Entering and managing yearly performance reviews * Managing IT tickets * Catching spyware, phishing, etc. * Key and click logging * Personality and other screenings for job candidates * Health insurance management * Jira being used outs…

> * Key and click logging What kind of dystopian Corporate hellscapes have you worked in? This is totally unacceptable. I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement, no matter how benign the intentions of it's implementor. Nothing good can come of it.

>> I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement

In many cases, you may not even realize it is running.

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

#362

Post by fiter »

jschwartzi wrote: post #282
paulddraper wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those numbers seem very suspicious. Cherry-picked maybe. Fifty dollars a month is a decently pricey subscription (like a lot more than Slack, JIRA, Lucidchart, Office, etc.), and you have twenty of those for every employee?

I've used specialized embedded system tools that cost $10,000/year per seat for tooling. Our QNX licenses were about $5,000 or $10,000/year alone. That's just to be able to run a piece of software. Autodesk tooling is $20 to 30k a year. Some of the more specialized tools cost six-figures. So I guess if you're just doing some basic web development those numbers are suspect. But if you do hardware or embedded software…

For such products, there's the per seat license and the per device license. Depending on volume and vendor pricing model more of the cost will either be in the seat or device license. The value of these the seat license is so that you can distribute their software on your devices versus the value of the seat license of Adobe CC is so that you can use the software directly.

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

#364

Post by rkagerer »

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…

It's probably total SaaS spend divided by headcount. There are lots of bits you may not interface with directly, e.g. backup & compliance, infrastructure monitoring, advertising. And as another comment suggested, certain specialized applications with sky-high license fees.

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

#365

Post by twojacobtwo »

prepend wrote: post #350
adjkant wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sheets will fit a lot of excel use cases for those not doing serious heavy lifting with it. FWIW, I'm a software engineer and our IT department actually let people opt out of Microsoft office if they weren't using it to save money, and encouraging people to use Google Docs/Sheets (as most do anyways). I'm guessing a good deal of software engineers did that but there are plenty of non-engineers that probably also did…

I am a big fan of sheets, but it is not Excel. Some of the functions are missing after all these years, not to mention charts and pivots. I think Google gave up on trying to compete with excel on features.

Sheets has charts and pivot tables. It definitely lacks some features of excel, but it also has some nice new additions that I love so far - e.g. Showing the return value of a formula while still editing.

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

#366

Post by WoahNoun »

Aeolun wrote: post #332
jschwartzi wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used specialized embedded system tools that cost $10,000/year per seat for tooling. Our QNX licenses were about $5,000 or $10,000/year alone. That's just to be able to run a piece of software. Autodesk tooling is $20 to 30k a year. Some of the more specialized tools cost six-figures. So I guess if you're just doing some basic web development those numbers are suspect. But if you do hardware or embedded software…

Maybe 1% of enterprises do hardware or embedded development.

You can pick a industrial vertical and find analogues though. Aerospace, automative, chemical, materials, biosciences. And even within a company each departments like finance, marketing, supply chain, etc have their own specialized software. Inventory management isn't cheap. Marketing software like marketo isn't cheap. ERP systems for the finance department aren't cheap. Accounting and tax software isn't cheap.

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

#367

Post by auxym »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #338
leetcrew wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if GP works in aerospace, those are very likely per-seat license costs.

Completely out of curiousity -- what software costs $35k per seat per year??

I heard about 20k per seat for CATIA at a previous employer. 35k wouldn't surprise me if you start adding add-ons (simulation, PDM, etc).

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

#368

Post by mywittyname »

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…

I used to work for a company whose licensing fees were mid-five figures a seat. Granted, not every person in the company needed a license; but nearly everyone involved in the production process did. The company also benefited from vendor lock-in, because skilled workers tend to get pretty attached to their workflows and competitors in niche software tend not to have 1-to-1 feature overlaps.

It seems like nearly every profession has high-priced software that's required: artists, engineers, accountants, lawyers, doctors/nurses, research scientists, architects, etc, are buying products from Adobe, Quicken, West Law, Reed Elsevier, Epic. None of those are small companies, yet all of them focus in somewhat niche information technology sectors. I'm struggling to come up with a profession that doesn't touch software anymore; even retail workers use point of sale and inventory software.

I do agree with your sentiment though. The software is expensive because it's so niche. The market for all of this stuff is pretty limited, meaning there's only a few products offered, and the capital required to build competitive products makes it prohibitive for a company to build their own. The companies making the software also understand their target industries intimately enough to know exactly what price the market will bare.

However, it does leave an interesting market opportunity for and engineer + domain expert to tap into the market with cheap, low-feature offerings. Or maybe we will see more companies bringing development back in-house.

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

#369

Post by WoahNoun »

crazygringo wrote: post #313
iamaelephant wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000/year. Really? You can imagine only #83/mo in software costs for a working professional? I think you're being really rather unimaginative.

I'm not trying to be super-imaginative, I'm trying to be realistic. That's the point. Considering Office 365 is $10/mo (before volume discounts) and is probably the main tool most office workers use, I am having a hard time how on earth you get to $10K/12=$833/mo. I'm supposed to believe the average office worker uses a total of subscription software that is eighty times more expensive than Microsoft Office?

Accounting software, payroll software, financial planning software, supply chain management/inventory, health insurance/401k/benefits/PTO software, JIRA/Ticketing, knowledge management (sharepoint/internal wiki/confluence), data warehouse licenses, reporting software (tableau, looker), IT and device management software, expense and reimbursement, business travel scheduling, performance management, contract management, backups and disaster planning, etc. And then any specialized software for actually doing different jobs roles (CAD, photo/video editing (think of the marketing and design departments of any F1000 company), IDE's for the developers, operations software for running a warehouse or factory, etc.

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

#370

Post by WoahNoun »

adjkant wrote: post #299
adwf wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hubris is half of software development ;)

Is the other half the hole of legacy support you dig yourself into supporting the bad decisions and naive assumptions you made driving with that hubris?

Nah that's when you leave the company and leave some intern to clean it up so they can develop their own sense of hubris over your bad decisions. And the cycle repeats.
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