Two rising tides—service-oriented architecture and open source software—are forcing vendors to rethink how they charge for software.
"This will be one of the big issues for the next five years," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting. But as of yet, he added, "there is no consensus on how to deal with it."
The traditional licensing model of big upfront costs for typically more capability than an organization needs to get started does not jibe with the incremental adoption mode favored by those going down the SOA road. And once those architectures are in place, organizations will be looking for smaller, reusable services they can dynamically link and change in composite applications versus the large soup-to-nuts applications they have been forced to buy in the past.
