As you may have noticed, there’s been a series of interesting developments at Graphical Networks lately…
For starters, we have a completely revamped website. We also just launched netTerrain 6.6 (finally!) and we introduced a new product for outside plant called netTerrain OSP. netTerrain OSP is ideal for campus fiber management, wireless network documentation, 
advanced circuit and cable management and more.
You can find out more about our new outside plant module here.
Before I get too technical here – and being the guy in charge of North American sales – I wanted to talk about something different today, though: pricing.
We are adding two new options to our pricing model:
- 1) A SaaS-based option
- 2) A yearly pricing model
In all fairness, we had a SaaS option before, but it was mostly available for existing customers in specific situations. Now we are making it official!
netTerrain SaaS
The obvious advantage of SaaS for the customer is that you can pay as you go and you don’t have to host netTerrain yourself. We offer monthly, quarterly, bi yearly or yearly contracts. This gives the customer more flexibility in payment options and much lower upfront costs.
With netTerrain SaaS, you get all three products in one! netTerrain logical, netTerrain DCIM and netTerrain OSP are all included in our SaaS option. The pricing is very competitive in terms of monthly payments, so even if you only need to do, say, network mapping, or maybe just Data Center Infrastructure Management, the fact that you get all features is not a hindrance (just don’t use what you don’t need).
The SaaS pricing model is also simpler: the base SaaS starts with 1 editor and 100 devices / 400 nodes. The next steps in users are 5, then 20 and then unlimited (remember, these are editors, the read-only ones do not count towards the license). The next steps in devices go from 250 to unlimited with several steps in between (1000, 2500, etc).
The main limitation of this model is that it currently doesn’t discover or monitor your network, since it is hosted by us, in our cloud platform. My recommendation would be to get the netTerrain SaaS if you do not want to host the software in-house (and do not need discovery) and want very low up-front costs or are dealing with a short term (less than 12 months) documentation project.
netTerrain Yearly Contract
As opposed to our traditional permanent license, the netTerrain yearly contract option provides you with the ability still host netTerrain at your premises with lower upfront costs and a license key that needs to be renewed every year if you want to continue using the product.
The netTerrain yearly contract provides all the granularity of the traditional permanent license:
- pick the type of product you need: logical for network mapping, DCIM for Data Center Infrastructure Management, OSP for outside plant
- pick the number of editors (users allowed to add or delete objects)
- pick the number of nodes (for logical), or devices (for DCIM and OSP)
My recommendation would be to go for this license type if you need to host the software in house, but need lower upfront costs than the permanent license (see below) or are dealing with a medium term (between 12 and 36 months) project.
netTerrain Permanent License
The permanent license is not new, of course, but I thought it would be good to briefly describe it here as well. The permanent license is for customers that, just like with the yearly license, want to host the software in-house but do not want to pay recurring license costs each year. The software is yours forever and you can optionally renew maintenance each subsequent year at a much lower cost than the yearly license.
My recommendation would be to go for this license type if you need to host the software in house and do not want to pay recurring license fees and/or need a long –term solution.
To summarize, here’s a nice table that shows the pros and cons of each license type:
