Subscriber Discussion

Is Anybody Else Experiencing Massive Price Gouging From Exacq?

U
Undisclosed #1
Feb 18, 2016

We started getting bizarre price quotes from Exacq in late December, limited time offers (less than 4 hours to accept and provide PO), and pricing all over the map. Since then, it has settled out to what amounts to a massive price increase for both initial license acquisitions and ongoing maintenance. This is all being done under a new 'pricing structure' for enterprise licenses. The software has not changed, just the pricelist. Our latest 'special price' for a volume purchase is almost double what we used to pay for both licenses and SSA.

Has anybody else experienced this? If so, how are you handling it or have you found an alternative to Exacq for your customers?

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U
Undisclosed #2
Feb 18, 2016
IPVMU Certified
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JH
John Honovich
Feb 18, 2016
IPVM

1, how 'massive' is massive? Have you price shopped to other Exacq integrators?

As 2 cites above, the changes in enterprise licensing are definitely for real, but I am not sure if they should be that much.

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
Feb 19, 2016

Your perceived level of increase in the Exacq Enterprise licensing model will be influenced by how many cameras you have per server. If you had 10 cameras per server and it used to cost $500 USD per server for the Enterprise option, then the Enterprise option per license in this example was $50/license ($500/10 licenses). If you had 50 licenses on a server, it was only $10 per license ($500/50 licenses).

But now, they charge per license and the Enterprise option is $75 USD more per camera than the Professional- so if you have 50 licenses, the Enterprise option is now worth an additional $3500 per server - this is MUCH more than $500.

So if OP's servers are 10 cameras, then the price will be almost the same. But if OP's servers are 50 cameras, then it's understandable that he/she would find the the increase "Massive".

An additional major price increase not mentioned so far is for the ESM (enterprise system manager) software. It used to be called Enterprise Health Monitoring and has a cost that was about 1/4 of the current ESM.

To Exacq's defense, though, the current Enterprise offerings (Enterprise license and ESM combination) are FAR beyond in functionality and capabilities compared to what was offered even a year ago. They are putting lots of effort and development into these features and they are pricing them at a premium.

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UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
Feb 20, 2016

If I might add something else to this - Exacq have been absolutely consistent in their Professional and Start licensing structure so I assume that your increase is solely due to the Enterprise licensing model. Could you not simply use the Professional licenses?

Do you absolutely need the Enterprise version for its functionality (since it's a relatively big premium to pay)? Which features in the Enterprise version do you absolutely need?

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U
Undisclosed #1
Feb 23, 2016
Sorry, I was out of town for a few days.  I appreciate the feedback here.  To respond to a few of the points made above: "massive" to me is approximately 74% increase on initial licenses (since required to move from Pro to Enterprise) along with a 126% increase on SSA; by my calculation, it takes 5.6 camera licenses to cover the cost of what ESM used to sell for, all licenses added after that are at the 74% markup; ESM is not strictly necessary but after making an initial investment in getting it up and running and basing your rollout on that it is difficult to go backwards. With Enterprise class servers claiming capacities of 64 to 128 cameras per server (not that I would recommend trying this), even nominal price increases to license or SSA prices could be significant for some. ESM may be better now but it still very much has a "version 1" feel to it. It's most useful feature to us is the single signon capability across servers but that only just started working and seems to require all servers to be at the same, or close to, software levels (which could impact your SSA and upgrade plans if the system is growing). I don't see the justification for the 400%+ price increase for ESM awhile back. Nor do I see the logic in paying a huge premium per camera for an 'enterprise' feature that is really more about the servers being interconnected than it is about the cameras connected to the servers. Overall, my points are twofold: Exacq issued huge price increases to enterprise customers with little to no notice; and with the SSA cost more than doubling, the long term operating costs of using Exacq are much higher than they were a couple of months ago.
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UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
Feb 24, 2016

I understand better your dilemma now.

Definitely, if you factor in the new SSA costs (which were negligible (less than $100 per server per year) under the old Enterprise model but are now in the order of $60 PER CAMERA per year, then the increases can reasonably be considered "massive".

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #4
Feb 23, 2016

Our Exacqvision manufacturers rep urged us to use Enterprise so that the non-certified Exacvision dealers could not invade our turf. This seemed reasonable enough. The multi-tier mapping and Enterprise management of user and cameras was the big plus. Few users integrate it with AD. $500 per server plus $85 SSA was a decent price, especially since we have many customers with 3+ servers (some with 8+).

Now we have seen a new policy where it is an increase of at least 50% for the SSAs and licenses. From what I understand, new customers do not pay the server fee, but instead the license fee. But existing customers already paid the $500 server fee???

A post previously on IPVM had the regional Exacqvision regional sales manager state that all existing Enterprise customers would be grandfathered, with a simple registration with the regional inside sales rep. This had not been the case, and we have not gotten a procedure in writing related to the procedure. It seems to be a case by case situation.

We sell yearly service contracts, so are not sure when the grandfathered pricing will no longer be valid. We have many customers with 200+ Enterprise licenses (some with 500+). Costs will be in the thousands when we can no longer get valid SSA.

Since customers are growing, there is frequently a need to add a new server. What will the cost be for Enterprise? How do we quote this.

I thought that the 150/25 500/85 pricing was convenient and easy for sales and service departments to deal with. Now, nobody knows.

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JH
John Honovich
Feb 24, 2016
IPVM

4, thanks for the detailed feedback. I've highlighted this with Exacq and asked if they can provide any clarification / response.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #4
Feb 26, 2016
Any response to this, John?
JH
John Honovich
Feb 26, 2016
IPVM

Not yet but thanks for following up. I just sent another email to Exacq bumping it up. We'll update if they respond.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #4
Feb 24, 2016

That was the post on IPVM last fall(Scott Dennison/Exacq-shown below). I stand corrected. Quotes were grandfathered and apparently existing customers are not? I have not figured out how I am going to break this news to customers after I sold the solution as $25/year/device. I have a hard time figuring out why Exacq would want to give up their Enterprise revenue base. Pro would be fine for most of our Enterprise customers and I do not see that the 50% increase in license cost will make it into most bids, proposals, and projects. My guess is that coming soon, Pro may only allow connections to a limited amount of servers, with Enterprise needed for unlimited? Limited client connections? Maybe this is why companies such as Milestone come out with different versions and pricing/functionality strategies, rather than affect existing customers on a specific platform.

I remember back when Tyco bought Exacq, an AD engineer posted on IPVM that Exacq was an inferior product (compared to AD) and would fill the companies bottom level solutions. Maybe they have recently recognized that it outsells AD on the Enterprise level and had to price accordingly. (I sure hope we do not have to pay $200 per seat client software fees like Intellix in upcoming versions).

"Dear Undisclosed 1 Integrator,

Yes, we are grandfathering enterprise software prices on systems quoted prior to October 1 2015. Please contact your Exacq sales representative to register your project for this price transition."

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U
Undisclosed #1
Feb 24, 2016

"Grandfathering" pricing on quotes prior to October 2015 really isn't helpful and again just helps with new systems and not the people who took a chance on their products so they could get big enough to spit in our faces. Perhaps it would have been partially helpful if they had made any attempt to let their customer base know that prices were going to double.

To make things worse, if you are using Enterprise, you have to keep your mtce active in order to stay connected to the enterprise monitoring. Therefore, you cannot take advantage of their (quite reasonable) option of doing a one-time upgrade to a server's software after it has expired (for a fair price) rather than paying for SSA continuously.

Keep in mind that the SSA increase is substantial for some. Using the example from above, if you have 500 cameras your annual SSA cost is now (500*$59) $29,500! And, you have to pay it or else quit using ESM.

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