Less user license for SMB: like 5 - 10 - 25 - 50 - 100 users

Idea shared by Gabriele Maoret - 7/20/2018 at 4:56 AM

Proposed

We have many Small Business customers (from 5 to 50 users) that want a On-Premise solution for their mail system.

The question is: is it possible to have license cuts for these small customers? For example, cuts from 5 - 10 - 25 - 50 and maybe 75 and 100 users, with a lower price also for the annual fee for the EWS, EAS and MAPI services?
Otherwise you will lose this band of customers who are not willing to pay the price of a license from (minimum) 250 users ...

11 Replies

Reply to Thread

kevind Replied

7/23/2018 at 9:42 PM

FWIW, we see the exact opposite (here in US). Small to medium businesses from 1-100 users are moving to hosted email because it's less expensive, more secure, and more reliable than an on-site server. IMO, SmarterMail's niche is to help the service provider provide a low-cost alternative to G Suite and O365.

Gabriele Maoret Replied

7/24/2018 at 1:37 AM

Hi Kevin! I understand that the American market is as you describe it, but our market (in Italy) is different ...

Smartertools is a company that works all over the world, and this should not be limited to a policy that works on the American market, but I think it should evaluate how all markets work ...

For this reason I asked if it is possible to have licenses that are closer to the request of customers who are in Italy (over 90% of Italian companies have less than 50 employees, with less than 20 employees who use the email, but many have internal servers in the company and prefer to have a mail server on premise rather than in the cloud ...).

If Smartertools then decides that it is not their goal, I will put my heart in peace ...

Gabriele Maoret Replied

7/24/2018 at 1:44 AM

Also, I think it's in Smartertools' interest that a retailer like me sells dozens of ON PREMISE licenses from, say, 10 or 25 or 50 more users, plus 2-3 licenses from a few hundred users I need to give service as a Mail Service Provider ...

kevind Replied

7/24/2018 at 7:04 PM

Gabriele, agreed. If you can sell dozens of licenses, then it seems like it would be in ST's best interest to help you accomplish that.

Very interesting that the Italian market prefers on-site servers and is going against the trend to cloud-based services.

Gabriele Maoret Replied

7/25/2018 at 12:27 AM

Hi Kevin, thanks.
To be more specific, it's not the entire Italian market that's going against the cloud trend.

However, there is a fairly large amount of small-medium companies that for various reasons prefer to have an internal infrastructure.
Some of these reasons (not all, there are others) are:
1 - digital divide: in Italy many companies do not have high-performance internet data connections (some are lower than 2Mbps / 384Kbps DOWN / UP), so having email in the cloud becomes a heavy slowdown in internal communications
2 - cultural: many do not trust themselves and their data outside the company
3 - control: many companies (even small ones) want to have COMPLETE control of their systems
4 - Backup: CLOUD systems often do not integrate a real backup system that can be managed by the clinician and this entails an additional expense to create a backup system that can be used by the action in case of Disaster Recovery. This decreases the economic advantage.
5 - archiving: as above ...

For all these reasons (and for others still ...) in Italy there is a good percentage of companies that prefer an on-premise system