Whey does Openfire Enterprise costs so much?

Hi,

according to Hardware Recommendations I can support up to 10,000 concurrent users with a simple dedicated server which will costs me something like 4000$ per year(300$/m). The enterprise edition will cost me 15$ per registered user (not concurrent???) and can sum to more than 150,000$/year. Obviously I get the web client and the other features of the enterprise edition. It just doesn`t make sense. Can any social network with 10,000 users spend 150,000$/year just for IM?

What am I missing?

Thanks

If you are an enterprise with 10k users and you need the control that the enterprise plugins offer, $150k is a real deal for what you get compaired to other enterprise IM servers out there. For instance, if having a web based chat for your sales staff to use costs you $15 per sales person, but each sales person is able to close one deal due to that application with a net profit greater than $15, then it has paid for itself and any further sales are full profit.

If you can’t afford the service, then you don’t truely need it. This is a tool for big business, not social networks.

Hey dror,

I wanted to add something to Reuben’s answer. Jive has flexible offers for big installations so I’m sure we can work something out. Feel free to contact sales@jivesoftware.com and find out the options that you have.

Oh, and remember that we just started our fist beta program that includes a nice promotion with important discounts. If you participate in the beta testing of Openfire 3.4.0 you can get important discounts.

Regards,

– Gato

and as far as enterprise products go, $15 per license is not a bad deal at all. ms live communicator license’s are as cheap as $33 per license if you have a good deal with your licensee, but can be almost $50 per user.

Isn’t live communicator licenses on a concurrent user basis?

We have 1200 users (and probably 500 of which use Openfire, 250 concurrent). I’d love an enterprise license, but all it would give me is logging (we don’t use the rest really as we only use it for ad-hoc communications between staff, no external sales stuff). So, $7500 per year for logging seems a little steep!

It’s be great to be able to contribute something back for such a good piece of software, but it’s so difficult to justify.