you right stressing the importance of on line (sales, support), I might add also that your survey make clear that you are not reducing business opportunities for your partners. Partners definitely strive for bigger deployments, indeed.

Looking forward to see how will look like the Community edition once 6.0 is out. Selling info-products might really be rewarding, I believe.

Thanks for the write-up. As usual, you raise interesting ‘big picture’ questions.

One small point of clarification: Starter Edition and Professional are completely identical from a feature set point of view (including basic auto discovery), the only differences being in the areas of number of devices, support mechanism, and automatic upgrade assurance to future versions. So while they completely overlap from a feature point of view, they do not overlap from a target market perspective.

One other additional note: Starter Edition users can receive credit for their purchase should they choose to upgrade to 6.0 Enterprise when it is released.

From a bigger point of view:

The question we had when we made Starter Edition was ‘What changes can we make to an enterprise product to make it practical to sell at a lower price point?’

Interestingly, in this case the answer had nothing to do with the code; the code is the same as GroundWork Monitor 5.3. Actually, keeping the code the same as Professional also helps keep the costs low.

The areas where we removed costs were:

1. How it is sold, selling it online only.
2. How it is supported, also online only.
3. How big the deployment can be, as this also affects the support costs.

Cheers!

Bei der “GroundWork Monitor Starter Edition” handelt es sich um eine Version mit den gleichen Leistungsmerkmalen der Professional Version, jedoch mit einer Beschränkung auf bis zu maximal 250 überwachte Geräte.

Die Starter Edition bietet damit…