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The elusive cost of library software.

Article Excerpt
A question that I'm often asked involves how much a library should expect to pay for automation software. As much as I try to understand all the various aspects of the library automation industry, I have never been able to discover a great deal of data describing what libraries actually pay for their automation products. While I have an informal sense of initial license payment and annual support fees paid by libraries of various types and sizes, it's based only on sketchy information.

Software Pricing: A Complex Matrix

Software pricing isn't a straightforward issue, since each procurement involves a special business arrangement between a library and its chosen vendor. I think that it's reasonable to scale the cost of a product to such factors as the size of the library, the complexity of the installation, the number of simultaneous users, or the quantity of resources involved. While some may feel that it's odd for different libraries to pay different amounts for the same software, adjusting the cost by these factors generally allows libraries with more modest needs and more modest budgets to pay less than those with more complex needs and larger budgets. The service and support needs for large and complex organizations cost more to fulfill than smaller-scale installations. Library automation isn't in the realm of shrink-wrap software. Rather, each installation is unique, and it's advantageous to both the libraries and the companies to peg the price of the software to appropriate indicators.

In the library automation industry, pricing is not only scaled according to multiple factors, it's also a result of a private negotiation. A vendor will propose a price in response to a request for proposals based not only on...

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