Creative storage licensing practices

While reviewing my blog feeds today, I came across a blog entry The Greed in Software Licensing. In this post, Snig mentioned his frustration with licensing policy of HDS Tiered Storage Manager (TSM) product and offered an alternate solution to his licensed storage issue.

In my experience, all storage software vendors, one way or another, employ such creative licensing strategies to maximize revenue per customer while keeping the entry fee low enough to lure new end users. What licensing strategies have you experienced from storage vendors?

Such incidents highlight the importance of due diligence by end-users and independent advisors before considering any new product or technology. I am sure HDS sales would have bent backwards to accommodate Snig's license request if it was part of initial sale.

Such business tactics surprise me. Most business educators preach that it is more expensive to get new customers than to keep current ones. Then why, in reality, most businesses treat their current customers worse than new customers?

Kudos to Hu Yoshida for responding quickly to concerns raised in Snig's post. Hopefully, his initiatives will bring structural changes in licensing practices instead of just a license handout to Snig.

This incident also goes to show the power of corporate blogging. How times have changed! Since Hu started blogging, my impression of HDS has shifted from a "closely guarded" company to company that want to converse with the market. Even though, the HDS storage was the first SAN attached storage I worked with, I never got involved further just because I found them difficult to communicate with!