Hi everyone,
you might have already seen the news in the .com site about the repackaging of our commercial offering. Until now it was based on Professional and Enterprise subscriptions as well as a series of extra services such as security updates and technical support.
We have realized that although our offering was very flexible and allowed to select just the needed services, it was actually too complex for our customers. So we have simplified it and bundled most services together in two options, targeting very different customer profiles: Small Business Edition for small businesses using Zentyal as a standalone server, and Enterprise Edition for medium businesses with more complex IT environments.
The other change has been semantic: many of our customers did not understand very well the concept of an open source, community software that got commercial services in the form of a subscription. So, despite the fact that we are not eager to separate community from commercial editions, we need to call them that way in order to make our offering understood. The good news is that it is just a semantic change: a commercial edition uses the same source code than community edition but it is bundled with commercial services (support, software and security updates, disaster recovery, etc).
I am totally confused at this announcement as there seems very little difference between the previous subscription charges and the current apart from name changes and a short sighted 25 user limit on a reduced service offering?
It would be interesting if you would put a comparison of the previous to the current and justify the above?
Zentyal is a modular service based product and many use it as a simple firewalled router with really good network control. At this level your subscription charges in my opinion are ridiculously high. The previous subscription charges where never service based and the only confusing point was the manner they where presented.
Zenyal Feature List Networking
Firewall and routing
Filtering
NAT and port redirections
VLAN 802.1Q
Support for multiple PPPoE and DHCP gateways
Multi-gateway rules, load balancing and automatic failover
Traffic shaping (with application layer support)
Bridged mode
Graphical traffic rate monitoring
Network intrusion detection system
Dynamic DNS client
Network infrastructure
DHCP server
NTP server
DNS server
Dynamic updates via DHCP
RADIUS server
VPN support
Dynamic routes autoconfiguration
IPsec support
PPTP support
HTTP proxy
Internet cache
User authentication
Content filtering (with categorized lists)
Transparent antivirus
Delay pools
Captive Portal
User authentication
Bandwidth limit
Intrusion Detection System
Mail Server
Virtual domains
Quotas
SIEVE support
External account retrieval
POP3 and IMAP with SSL/TLS
Spam and antivirus filtering
Greylisting, blacklisting, whitelisting
Transparent POP3 proxy filter
Catch-all account
Webmail
Web server
Virtual hosts
Certification authority
Workgroup
Centralized users and groups management
Master/slave support
Windows Active Directory Synchronization
Windows PDC
Password policies
Support for Windows 7 clients
Network resource sharing
File server
Antivirus
Recycle bin
Print server
Groupware: calendar, address book, contacts, etc.
VoIP server
Voicemail
Conference rooms
Calls through an external provider
Call transfers
Call parking
Music on hold
Queues
Logs
Jabber/XMMP server
Conference rooms
FTP server
Zentyal User Corner for self users info updating
Reporting and monitoring
Dashboard for centralized service information
Monitor CPU, load, disk space, thermal, memory
Disk usage and RAID status
Summarized and full system reports
Event notification via mail, RSS or Jabber
Bandwidth data usage
Virtual Machines management
Software updates
Backups (configuration and remote data backup)
Many of us (community) use Zentyal in a specific way and would like to use and pay for the services required. If I only use a small subsection of the services available why should I subsidise someone who uses all?!
Also why 25 users as basically many will be forced into either enterprise pricing or like myself at that level self support for free. The current pricing is over double current competitive products such as ClearOS and I would like to know how Zentyal can substantiate this?
The current per server subscription with a 25 user limit is ridiculous from the standpoint of more users than 25. On higher demand networks it would be a logical methodology to partition across several servers that provide specific functions (services).
In my opinion it would seem that Zentyal has shot itself in the foot and lowered its potential revenue. Instead of receiving a large qty of reasonable price subscriptions they will receive a few overpriced ones.
Quite frankly there is only one way I can describe the choice of offering and subscription level and that is brain fart.