Comments on: FiveRuns 1.0

By: People Over Process

People Over Process — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:19:23 +0000

Netreo Briefing

Last week I spoke with Kevin Kinsey, CEO of Netreo. Netreo announced an OnDemand (hosted or SaaS) version of their network management platform, OmniCenter. Network Management I often refer to the whole slew of applications that help you monitor and…

By: rickyrodeo

rickyrodeo — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 10:39:04 +0000

Finally someone that has hit the nail on the head, systems management that is stupid simple to deploy and maintain and doesn't require a full time staff to manage it. In the end all the sys admin, IT director, and CTO want is to know when a system or service is down and unavailable via a page and some basic historical reporting to bash people over the head with at staff meetings. We've somehow fallen into this paradox that if a product is not super expensive or uber complex that it is an inferior product. Case in point, Quickbooks really does meet about 98% of what a small business needs but MS makes bushels of money on Great Plains which is much more expensive and harder to setup. Jobs however makes a fair wage making expensive computers that are super easy to use. (head scratch) heh.

Is $60 a month too much? For $2 day I could use that money to feed a family in Haiti, but if I'm hosting systems that are generating 100's or 1000's of dollars each day, $2 seems cheap for a "set it and forget it" type of system. I can tell you this much, the Big 4 or even open source can't even come close to that.

By: Cote'

Cote' — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:33:17 +0000

You're right on the examples there. FiveRuns is more interested in the Small to Medium companies, so I think that example would be excluded. That said, while you might only pay $100/month for the physical server, if the software you were running handled several $100's of your business a month (or thousands), the price seems smaller.
Still, your point is taken: there's a certain price barrier that your servers have to be "worth" (calculated by fixed monthly fees and the fuzzier figure of how much money the server generates a month) before you'd want to pay $60/month.
In comparison to more traditional offerings, though, $60 isn't too shabby.
Also, the first few cuts at pricing rarely stick. I'm sure FiveRuns will go through several pricing schemes over the next few years before they get it right. It'd be nice to see a $10 and $20 offering for the $100/month servers. Of course, the other angle for FiveRuns is to sell to the service providers who are hosting those $100/month services, and have the hosting companies list FiveRuns as a feature for that $100.
But, you've gotta start somewhere with pricing, and thankfully they've started simple: just one price ;>

By: Thorsten

Thorsten — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 15:52:57 +0000

Fiveruns looks pretty cool indeed and I wish them the best. I am wondering whether they didn't spend more time on the UI than on the "actual works" of system monitoring, however. Also, it seems that small companies either are not aware of the concept of monitoring or are not willing to spend money for that (or both). Specially when you can rent a dedicated server for a little over $100/mo, are you really going to be willing to spend $60/mo just to monitor it?