On September 21st, Salesforce announced they had acquired Assistly, a cloud-based customer service vendor.
I wrote at length about Assistly’s pricing model and how it could change the world of customer service and cloud – “renting” capacity by the hour and adding gamification elements to ensure adoption and continued use was quite interesting. Apparently, Salesforce thought the same thing, and after a few rumors, the transaction finally happened.
However, this was no traditional technology transaction. The real interest in this acquisition was not the IP as much as the people behind the IP. In addition, Salesforce is interested in looking at alternative pricing models for their products. These two items together make it a very interesting acquisition, scheduled to deliver results right away and leading the way for the future with smart people and new models.
A research note with more details and discussion was distributed to my clients earlier, please contact me if you are interested in the note or joining the mailing list.
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We have offered usage-based pricing as a special option since 2002, but our customers are much more interested in getting that old-styled pricing per concurrent user, which in the end provides them with the best value possible and lets them better manage within budget.
I find this hourly pricing model to be more marketing gimmickry than anything else. However, if you only offer the standard per-seat option, I guess it’s better than nothing.
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I experimented with this at Callidus while implementing our on-demand solution.At the time it was hard (maybe because of our tenancy model) to aggregate usage measures (storage, transactions, etc.) to monetize it.Have you found this to be in particular demand in customer service solutions or more widely applied to other CRM apps?
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