Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Dear Michael

Quick question – is this like Medline, Ovid or SilverPlatter? Or are you the niche player and two of these are mass-market?

Also will your product be for pure research or for reference production or citation referencing etc?

Don’t life scientists just love the paper-trail?! Given how keenly the Reference Manager and EndNote are priced for site licences, if your answer to the above is vaguely positive, I think you’ll need to licence by site, by size and on a smaller scale by users. They’ve all tried to control the one-license many user problems for the last 15 years and the different ways of achieving it are limited. One of my favourites is contemporaneous licensing which restricts only how many users from a given institution can log in at the same time.

Let us know the answers and I’ll give you some further views. I use the various abstract services as a means of targeting people who most sales directors can’t even pronounce, never mind understand what they do!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions

I believe Steve is referring to software that ensures that only N users from an institution can be online at the same time.

You want to price your offer so that the company isn't tempted to have everyone share the license. Price the first license to recoup the costs of getting the contract. Additional users increase the need for customer service, but not much else. Therefore, you can drop the price accordingly. For one suggestion, take a look at Microsoft's volume licensing: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mlahome.mspx

Don't forget a student license. That's a great way to get new users and have them spread the word for you.

Jay is correct. The licensing is the alternative to “Named user” licensing which is favoured by most software companies because it forces users to purchase as many licences as there are users – following the lead from Microsoft. Our own CRM package Maximizer, went from Contemporaneous Licensing to Named User Licensing a few years back, but the database engine the basic versions run on (Pervasive SQL) uses contemporaneous licensing. When you are doing this to access data, the main difference is that you need to adopt a service model for managing the licence rather than having the licence details encoded and stored in your PC. Look at the models used by salesforce.com or our own e-CRM versions of Maximizer to see how this is achieved (We have client portals which can be accessed by up to n users, but no more)

You can even go a step further to develop a relationship with the various users by having them create a log-on account with an email address so that you can communicate with them to attempt to boost further membership.

Wiglaf’s remark about diminishing returns is totally correct and I think that he has underplayed the usefulness of having a named user access previous searches by having the results, references and citations stored somewhere accessible to the particular user. Researchers, even collaborating researchers, are a competitive lot and the ability to keep your own lines of investigation to yourself until you are ready to share them should not be underestimated. That is one of the main drawbacks of using a shared log-on! (But not so great that everyone in the organisation will purchase a separate licence!)

One part of your original submission baffled me – perhaps you could explain. You said that, “We want to price for short term penetration without leaving a lot of potential revenue on the table.” I don’t understand what you mean by that. If you are working on the basis of launching a model, milking it for revenues until it becomes unprofitable and then abandoning it, you will earn the undying hatred of those researchers who found your data and services to be useful. If you meant something else, I can’t understand what it is.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions