It is no wonder that the open-source community is thriving, when IT organizations are held captive by such companies that believe value generation is found in a high cost a la carte menu product strategy. Whatever happened to integrating this value into the standard product rather than punishing companies with larger deployments via the reverse economies of scale concept?

When will enterprise customers say enough with this high-cost non-integrated bloatware that never seems to deliver on Marketings promises and inflicts such a high productivity cost on an already overwhelmed IT workforce? This is just another Silo-based product strategy that gives the illusion of seamless integration.

Look what this Protocol Analyzer vendor is charging for this stuff and you know that customers will have separate Maintenance charges for each line item for an even higher total cost of ownership.

“Flow Collector pack for Visualizer 4.5 costs $10,000 and $500 per NetFlow source device”

“NetVigil 4.5 costs $50,000.”

“Application Intelligence…The software loads on top of Network General's InfiniStream 4.0 platform and costs $12,500 for a single processor box and $17,500 for a dual processor appliance. “

Someone needs to open their eyes and see that this king has no clothes and that the end-user will end up the same.