3rd Party SPLA Vendors
is making great market share strides in the SPLA marketplace as the sheer depth that GP offers is turning the tide on many accounts that might have gone to products like NetSuite in the recent past. But with depth comes complexity and additional implementation cost – two things that counter the ideal SPLA model. Ideal SPLA products typically are (1) smaller, less complex and (2) faster to implement.
On-Premise Still Major
So why do vendors who traditionally provide larger, more “on-premise” solutions to the marketplace provide them in SPLA subscription models? The answer is simple – the increased popularity and demand from SPLA users cannot be ignored any longer. Clients with more complex needs want the best of all worlds – variable monthly pricing without large upfront capital expenditures – off-premise hosting with all the “bells and whistles” of complex applications.
As for the subscription rules being different from SPLA vendor to SPLA vendor, this is just a business model choice. Some vendors ask customers for no commitments greater than one month while others can ask for minimum commitments of six months to a year. In the monthly model, they incur greater admin cost due to monthly invoicing and have to constantly update user counts. In models that ask, for example, for six-month minimum subscription commitments, the customer is invoiced once (versus six times) and user count monitoring does not need to be as rigid.
Some resellers and users of GP also ask why the monthly cost of some SPLA products are so high relative to, for example, base Dynamics GP module pricing. Again, the answer is simple – larger, more complex products with higher, on-premise pricing will have higher monthly subscription costs. Vendors who still have larger, on-premise on-going business models cannot give preferential pricing to SPLA customers to the deference of their core, on-premise business model.
But these are all great problems to have! In fact, they are opportunities. So whether your client is small or larger and more complex, Dynamics GP can handle their immediate or longer term ERP application needs.
