The Year of MANTA and Why We’ve Published Our Pricing Online
We’ve seen a massive surge in the world of data lineage over the last year. More buzz, more leads, more customers for us and (from what I’ve heard) for other metadata and data governance players as well. To end this year in style, we’ve decided to do something which is very common in other industries, but not in ours. It might come as a bit of a disruption, but we’ve published our pricing online. Why?
The Year We’ve Come Through
2017 is coming to an end, and so it is the right time to take a look back. It was a very hot year for metadata and data governance. Partially thanks to the new GDPR regulation, but there are more reasons behind it – more and more enterprises have come to the understanding that the only way to build an efficient data-driven company is through proper data governance. In 2016, data got a lot of attention, how big it is or can potentially be, how to manage large volumes, velocity, and variety in data.
In 2017, we all started to realize that it is not just about data, but also a lot about data algorithms – the way your data is and how it’s gathered, transferred, merged, processed, and moved around your company. Thanks to GDPR, internal discussions have been initiated about how and where sensitive / protected data elements are used, and suddenly, it turns out that we are flooded not just with data but with data algorithms too, and it is impossible to handle it all manually without automation.
That has drawn even more attention to MANTA and its unique data lineage automation capabilities. Our website basically exploded – our audience doubled and the use of our live demo nearly tripled. We have on-boarded several amazing new customers from all around the world, and we delivered four major releases this year, with plenty of new features in all of them including Public & Service APIs and new technologies (SSIS, IBM Netezza, IBM DB2, and Impala, to name a few). Simply said, 2017 was a fantastic year and more is coming in 2018!
And even though this year was yet another giant step for MANTA, we decided to do one more thing that will shake things up. We’ve done something that’s pretty common in all the other industries except ours.
Yes, we’ve published our pricing online for everyone to see.
And why?
MANTA Is Taking the Lead in Transparency and Openness
Sometimes there are good reasons for hiding the price of your product or service. And it is common practice in the enterprise software industry. But does that really make sense? Let’s take a look at the usual reasons, then:
1) You might be legally bound to hide the price by a government or its suppliers. Yes, national security is a serious issue, and there might be some limitations put on companies which deal with it. But that works only for individual deals and is hardly a reason to hide the price.
2) You want to participate in tenders with secret bids. Yes, that also makes sense – especially when you are dealing with clients that focus only on the price. You would not want to lose just because your bid is a few thousand higher, would you? Perhaps not, but this is not our case – MANTA is a very unique software product with clear and easy to see value for its users. The price has to be reasonable, but it is rarely a way how to win anyone’s business.
3) You want to keep everybody in the dark. Yes, some do want that. But frankly, it’s a rather dishonest strategy. It’s foolish to expect that customers do not know other players on the market and their prices. It’s even more foolish to try to control the market by spreading rumors and making deals in the shadows.
When you are confident of your product and what it stands for, you are also confident of its price. There’s no reason to follow the “industry standard” by not disclosing the enterprise IT product prices. So dive into our pricing right here and if there’s something that needs clarification, just take a look at our pricing glossary right below it.
Thank you for your support this year and see you in 2018!
Yours,
Tomas
This article was also published on MANTA's blog. Let me know what you think here or on [email protected].
Father of 3 amazing humans, a unicorn, a robot and a book. CEO & Co-founder of STEAM Academy. Previously CEO and Co-founder of InfoScout (now Numerator).
7 年In every market full of shadows, there is always a bright opportunity for a disruptor to illuminate the space with transparency, whether it be in methodology & technological IP, in pricing, or in everything about how you do business. Cheers to being that disruptor, Tomas!
Midlife Mentor??Ut?ídění my?lenek a emocí v labyrintu st?edního věku ?? Inspirace rozhovorem, ktery jde do hloubky
7 年So proud to hear this! Thumbs up!
Founder & CEO at Wultra. Building post-quantum authentication (PQA) for banks and fintechs.
7 年IMO not a good decision, we went the opposite direction and had to close our pricing. Your software is not so simple people can buy it online and start using it without your help. By the nature of the "data business", I believe your services and custom installation will be always required. As a result, your "table pricing" will never actually take place - you will need to discount / modify pricing for every single customer you have. Also, this step is partially closing you from setting different prices for different regions. I am interested in how you see the situation in 6-9 months...