Hello to everyone,

What do you do when you have to develop an application for a small
customer (only 1 or 2 users) and the mvDBMS's costs makes your work not
competitive?

I ask this because I find myself in this situation and I see it's not
possible to contend against solutions developed with cero-cost DB like
Ms-Access or even MSDE.


Best regards,

Cristian A. Clavero
Buenos Aires
Argentina

The only answers (if you want to stay with MV) are:
1. Use OpenQM
2. Pay for the MV licenses and recoup your costs in future customizations or
support fees.
Jeff


"cc" <cristianclavero (AT) topmail (DOT) com.ar> wrote

Hola Cristian:

Como bien dice Jeff puedes mirar OpenQM.

De todos modos MS-Access si que tiene un costo y además, según mis
noticias desaparece en breve.

El otro día, comentando con un cliente en España el mismo tema, le
sugerí otra opción:

Me imagino que la aplicación será estandard y la tendrás en más
clientes. Una buena opción es tener la aplicación en tu oficina y
venderles un acceso remoto es decir un servicio remoto de aplicaciones.
Tu les cobras una iguala mensual, les mantienes el software, les haces
los backups, etc. No es muy dificil de implementar, puedes trabajar con
licencias concurrentes con varios clientes, etc.
Además un problema añadido a este tipo de cliente suele ser la
necesidad de ir a sus instalaciones a resolver problemas. De este modo
con un navegador, o un emulador, una VPN y una ADSL puedes generar un
nuevo tipo de negocio, bastante diferente de lo que estan
acostumbrados.

un saludo desde España

joseba

cc wrote:
I sounds like the customer is not dictating a product, so you could
still choose an OpenQM, perhaps? You would not be doing right by your
customer to use Access for most things, IMO.
--dawn

Christian-

OpenInsight, from Revelation Software, lets developer create single
user runtime versions of a developed database for free.

So, if you are a developer, you can create the application in your
copy of OpenInsight and roll out a single user version of it for free
to the client.

AN eval copy can be downloaded from www.revelation.com

Hope it helps-

Mike Ruane
Revelation Software

On 16 Nov 2005 03:17:39 -0800, "cc" <cristianclavero (AT) topmail (DOT) com.ar>
wrote:

Joseba,

Gracias por tus comentarios.

Cuando al igual que Jeff mencionas OpenQM como alternativa , te
refieres a la versión open source de QM?

Tengo entendido que dicha versión solo está disponible para
desarrolladores (bajo Linux) y no para ser instalada en el cliente.

Saludos,

Cristian

For english speakers, Joseba proposed that Christian host his
application for the end-user to access remotely. Christian is
wondering about deployment of QM at the end-user site.

Perhaps now would be a good time for Martin to explain what a
commercial license of OpenQM is, and whether someone can deploy a
commercial solution using the open source version.

I really understand Christian's dilemma - I think small businesses are
a very large and potentially profitable market, but we can't get near
them with most MV offerings. If this is a project for only one site
with only 1-3 people using it, then you might want to use MS Access.
If you go away then they can find anyone to maintain your code. This
solution is better for the end-user than for the developer - MV is
never a good solution for isolated end-users. If you are writing an
application for a lot of small end-users, and you intend to maintain
that code, then consider OpenQM, Revelation OpenInsight. If you are
going to provide a hosted solution as Joseba suggests, you can use any
MV or non-MV tools you want.

For common software needs, if you can't compete, don't. If the
end-user is looking for accounting software to run their business then
you might want to consider recommending off-the-shelf packages to them
like QuickBooks or the new Small Business Accounting 2006 from
Microsoft. It's only about $160 without MS Office integration, and
probably good enough for most small businesses. There is a lot of
other software out there in the world available for free - make sure
you are not going to re-write something for a lot of money that this
small user can download for free somewhere else.

I hope that helps a little.
Tony

"cc" <cristianclavero (AT) topmail (DOT) com.ar> wrote:

Glen B wrote:
I have to agree with you there. I see no benefit to the customer in
using Access. The developer can benefit if they are the type of
consultant that likes to set something up quickly and then get be set
with consulting gigs for a long time.

Additionally, I had this great interview with a decision support
professional at a university who was exporting data from UniData to
Access in order to do reporting. All of his reports ended up on Excel.
He didn't like his data out of synch with the live database, so first
they took a snapshot in UniData.

So, the Access database was not the official source of the original
data, not the official source of the frozen data (i.e. data mart), and
not the tool for reporting. What was it? It was the data source for
Excel. Why? Because you have to do painful SQL with multivalue
systems in order to configure them as the "data source" from within
Excel. I've preached doing that but I'm not a believer anymore. Once
the office tools have something other than ODBC that can point at XML
data sources, hopefully the multivalue vendors will have the right API
so that works with PICK too. I'm getting off-topic, sorry.

I think they HAVE ...

The what-is-next-after-Access market is still open in my opinion. I
don't know what google is doing with base.google.com but I'm sure it
isn't pick. It seems like some combination of the web and multivalue
could go far. If a company like google hosted data like they do with
gmail, it would really catch on, given the same price tag as gmail with
some n gig limit before you pay. So I think google has more chance
than MS of capturing the small db market. They obviously know how to
handle web-based huge, scalable data respositories too. They just
haven't played their database cards yet, I suspect.

--dawn

Tony Gravagno wrote:
Ah! The old GPL question.... Ignoring all the complexities, in simple
terms, you may ship a commercial solution using the open source version
of QM but you must also make your own components open source. Also,
remember that the open source strictly comes with absolutely no support
though we do seem to forget about that at times.

A commercial QM licence only costs around US$120 per simultaneous user
for a permanent licence including free upgrades for one year and no
mandatory support contracts. At that price, you've probably spent more
in terms of the time lost thinking about whether to go for it! The
free upgrade period can be extended to ten years for a small surcharge.

The open source is currently only released for Linux whereas the
commercial product is available for Windows (98 upwards) and for
FreeBSD. Other platforms are likely to follow if user demand is there.

Martin Phillips, Ladybridge Systems Ltd

Glen,

I understand the sentiment and concern here, and "we" are not alone. I
know that a couple of our Visage VARs are now providing solutions via
the web, targetting people that would otherwise be "unreachable" - the
fact that a single connection can service multiple people across
different acoounts "helps" defray the licence costs.

I also know of at least one other VAR is tackling the dollar$ problem
using QM (Goo'day), because the price point of the commercial/supported
product is not unreasonable

Still, none of these solutions will overcome the ZERO database cost
option, and you can also put "larger"products like mySQL etc into that
pile, and/or the ZERO cost open source option for applications as well.

Whilst I wouldn't necessarily be "scared" out of the low end, for the
time being the sub $200 solutiuons are going to lack a (fair) bit in
terms of functionality, and you need some good reference points of
people that took "free" solutions and then paid a (relative) fortune to
make them work in order to sell against this product class.

Without this, then perhaps you need top consider if it is worthwhile
trying to work towards a sale for a client that has already flagged
themselvs as being dollar conscious - is this a market you can afford
to chase ?

If this is a specific, one-off development then the cost of the
database may be absorbed across the entire project. If you are looking
at doing development for potential resale, then you need to do the
discounting sums VERY carefully




Glen B wrote: