Just had a lovely customer meeting - fed them he precanned BS on how much Octane spends on R&D and how this is the new CA.
That’s great they said - how much of treat is going into the products we purchased from CA? What is the roadmap?
Errrr.....I’ll have to get back you on that. We actually don’t have a roadmap. Not sure how long the customers will tolerate this silliness
Well these so called CA sales people really are / were contract finance negotiators (said with all respect)...
CA would buy a company every 2-3 years and everyone threw that product into to contract renewal and made large amount of product new sales bonus money , while discounting all existing products further down...
And now they are selling off all those add on product and want to be left with the Mainframe products. Or if they are not selling them, think they can do renewals without using sales people....
They might get away with it... who knows... Octan can for sure just say Pay or drop all products ... which is impossible for MF customers... and don’t say the competition is here to help... there is always one or two products that can’t be replaced and as long as you need one.... it cost the same as them all... brilliant
Did you smuggle them some chips? Nah? That was the great plan of Hock.
Kudos to all sales people which will be facing customers in the near future. I would love to be fly on the wall during those meetings :)
CA had no roadmap for most of the products. That is why every time CA was buying a market leader in 2-3 years product was no longer the top product.
"It was a combined negotiated amount for everything."
That's right. CA pricing is like in a Middle Eastern bazaar. You must always negotiate like crazy, because real product price is much much lower than initially asked one.
And I'm not a sales person. I just feel it in my guts.
How do you unwind 35 years worth of contracts at a client site like this? If someone has 100 MF products and 50 distributed products and they pay a total of 100M$ annually - then how does it work when Octane spin off the 50 distributed products?
From what I recall - most CA sales contacts never had products listed by price. It was a combined negotiated amount for everything.
Competition is there. Don't worry.