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A decade ago, OSS/BSS vendors were “king” and successfully demanded very high prices for their products. Starting contracts in the millions and 10s of millions were standard and 100 million dollar sales occurred. As the market collapsed after the bubble, instead of reducing list prices, vendors began to discount every sale. Random discounting occurred in attempts to create lock-in and recoup investment value later. Today’s perpetual license list prices reflect the prices that were possible during the bubble at the turn of the century and do not reflect any strategic “pricing-center” strategy. Discounting has become such a standard expectation that it is extremely difficult and costly to gain comparables and set prices. SIs promote this situation as it creates virtual value for them with their ability to provide mixed product bids as responses to RFIs/RFPs. As a result, many software vendors have just stopped listing their “list” prices and one wonders if these list prices even exist anymore. This makes reference-based pricing difficult to achieve in the OSS/BSS world.

Positively, the market for OSS/BSS software is larger than ever with hundreds of service providers in the 2^nd tier market and larger enterprise customers directly acquiring OSS/BSS for their private networks. Yet the smaller revenue size of these 2^nd tier vendors and enterprise customers limits the monetary value of each sale. Sales costs need to be minimized and that usually excludes prestige pricing. Each individual sale becomes less important and pricing strategy should shift to increasing number of sales instead of landing a few high-value sales. While established vendors attempt to hold on to prestige prices, these “very high” list prices make less sense in this market and service providers realize this.

Value-based pricing is now considered the best approach to the health of both the software vendor and the Service Provider. But this is complicated where the service provider is itself a middle-man seeking to provide sustained value to their end customers. Traditionally OSS/BSS products were transparent to the end customer and software vendors could concentrate on

seldom stops at just the utility of greater efficiency at existing tasks. Majitek’s cloud infrastructure also provides facilities which are not otherwise in some service provider’s arsenal, such as enabling the sale of the restricted viewing license of a media product: the right to see a movie for 3 days or the downloading of a song to a specific device. Even rarer in BSS, Majitek provides the ability to market and sell third party services. It is much more difficult to determine absolute value here, because the utility is dependent on the permeability of the service provider’s market for these new services. Yet within that permeability, the value is equal to the marginal return of sales from delivering the service.

Therefore, the complete value of any such cloud-based portal product will include the:

• Operational efficiency value to the provider of its automated delivery of services;
• Value to the end-customer as the primary point of contact of the service provider with its customer;