[Zope] Save Zope (and me) before Citrix!

[Dylan Reinhardt]

On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 02:13, Jaroslav Lukesh wrote:
> : Odesílatel: Oliver Marx <Oliver@tekk.dk>
> : Ur boss should just charge the clients a higher rate per hour. Very 
> : simple. You do a good job with Zope. It is not the hours you spend but 
> : the solution you provide - that counts. So actually if your boss was 
> : just a little smarter, you could earn him more money than the M$ guy...
> 
> Higher rate is unaccepteble for clients, when it will see 5x more than with
> M$ solutions. 

The trick is not to bill it that way.  Bill out cost of ownership, not
parts and labor.

For example, suppose there's a M$-derived product whose costs break down
like so:

Licensing fees ........ .. $10,000
Labor ..(200 hours @ 50).. $10,000

The client pays you if the solution is worth $20,000. Few, if any, will
care how it's written.

Let's say you could deploy a just-as-good solution in half the time
using Zope.  Having stipulated that such a solution is worth $20,000 to
the client, you maintain that price.  Now you've got:

Licensing fees ........... $     0
Labor ..(100 hours @ 100)  $10,000
Pure profit .............. $10,000

But on the client's invoice it says:

Excellent software ....... $20,000


> But I will try to push my chief to selling solutions from me, not service
> hours. Chief sells mainly service hours (he have simple calculator: much
> time = much money).

See if his calculator does this function:

Same price - lower overhead = more money

Support contracts also work better if you charge a monthly support fee
instead of billing out incidents hourly.  Moving away from hourly
billing for support tends to increase client satisfaction a lot, too. 
The easier a product is to support, the more support can become a profit
center instead of a cost to avoid. 

HTH,

Dylan




> Thanks to all, J. Lukesh
> 
> 
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