Microcommerce and enterprise IT

If you look around you'll notice that across many industries, particularly those in consumer markets, transactions that are traditionally offered in bundles are now sold a la carte. The best examples include digital music where you can purchase a single song, pay-per-click advertising, and, in publishing, per-story pricing. According to an article, Gartner said that, "opportunities for new products and services costing less than $5 will generate $30 billion in revenue per year by 2010." I'd be hard-pressed to find anything of interest to an enterprise IT buyer for less than $5, but this phenomenon is taking shape in somecorners of the industry. The best example is the utility or on-demand computing with its usage-based pricing where payments can be structured around central processing units (CPUs) for computers, and gigabytes (GB) for storage. Unfortunately, that one has too few fans to make it relevant.

The real potential now lies in software. Large vendors are rebuilding their feature-packed business suites to offer a wide range of configurable components that enterprises can pick and choose from. Its not going to stop there. According to Nucleus Research, "hosted CRM will be reconsidered as companies reevaluate the lifetime cost of hosted CRM and look at hybrid and other models further to avoid paying in perpetuity." These will most likely include per unit pricing for the smallest chuncks of code that can still be labeled a component, such as updates, patches, templates, dictionaries, and Java applets.

But keep in mind, while microcommerce schemes can save money it can also get expensive, so the right bundle may be the best choice when you know what you need.