Software pricing has recently become a topic of much debate, especially in today’s mobile and cloud technology era. Analysts, such as Forrester’s Duncan Jones, find that “the traditional pricing models that currently dominate the software market are obsolete and no longer match products’ cost to the business value they deliver.” In no market category is this more true than in enterprise backup and recovery.
Years ago, agent-based backup software pricing models were based on the number of machines protected and the capacity of data that was protected. But now, with the proliferation of the cloud and the exponential growth of data, these pricing models no longer deliver customer value. Companies that have data growth that exceeds the percentage of data that is recovered over time often find that the price of their backup software/services has become out of sync with the value they derive.
The time has finally come for performance-based pricing to enter the backup and recovery market. Let’s face it; data backups are not performed to just store information. They are performed so that data can be easily recovered if necessary. As such, I believe that backup and recovery pricing should be based on the volume of data recovered, not on how much has been backed up. I’m not alone. According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group analysis survey, most enterprise customers recognize that they are unfairly paying for 100% recovery, when they don’t use it. To be fair, those organizations that recover less, should pay less, and those who recover more, should pay more.
This type of pay-per-use pricing would deliver immediate and sustainable savings for customers of every size. When pricing is decoupled from data growth and tied to the important data that is of value to recover, companies can now easily see the value of the solution they are paying for. It also brings pricing “fairness” back to the backup market so that companies with high data growth are not penalized unfairly, especially if they do not recover data that often.
At long last, the technology to achieve this performance-based pricing for backup and recovery is here. Asigra has released technology that shows the percentage of data recovered over time. Asigra Recovery Tracker™ enables us to now deliver a Recovery Licensing Model that directly aligns pricing to a customers’ recovery usage. With the Asigra Recovery Tracker we can now capture recovery events throughout the customer environment and offer a fairer pricing model that aligns value with the customer’s usage. It’s a backup and recovery pricing revolution that finally puts the control back into the customers’ hands – and at Backup Technology we are pleased to be among the first to offer it.
