Google has shaken up the way it offers and prices support to enterprises in a bid to win more business and differentiate from the competition. The company made the announcement at this week's Next conference, and provided the key details in a blog post:
Support is part of the overall product experience, and we think it should be tailored to your unique technical needs. We’re announcing the all new Engineering Support, a role-based subscription model that allows us to match engineer to engineer, so we can meet you where your business is, no matter what stage of development you’re in.
We know you don’t have just one project or team. We know you're constantly shifting engineers around as software development projects move from concept to development to production. With this in mind, we took a look at support and asked: Why should you be forced to pick just one support plan for your whole company? Why should you be locked into paying for a multi-year support contract? Why should you pay more for support as you spend more on the platform? If we’re doing our jobs, then you should spend less over time.
Engineering Support will be sold by the seat, but in three service-level tiers.
Development engineering support will provide a four to eight business-hour response time and costs $100 per user per month. This is ideal for developers and QA engineers, Google says.
Moving up, production engineering delivers a one-hour response time on critical issues and is priced at $250 per user per month.
The top tier is called on-call engineering support and is rather gold-plated indeed. Under this service level, a Google engineer will be paged and will deliver a response time within 15 minutes, 24-7. It costs $1,500 per user per month.
This approach will give customers much more flexibility to match support to their actual needs and in the process, save money, Google says. For example, there's no need to pony up for top-level support just because a single project requires a 15-minute response time, the blog post notes.
Google will apply the Engineering Support framework with new customers immediately and work to transition existing ones during the rest of this year.
It's a radically different paid support model than Google's current one, which offers bronze, silver and gold tiers with minimum monthly pricing, and then usage-based pricing after the minimum monthly threshold is reached.
While usage-based support pricing obviously benefits Google and other cloud players when customer workloads grow larger, the Engineering Support model could help entice enterprises to bring a more diverse set of workloads to Google's cloud, increasing the service's stickiness.
"Simplifying support and its monetization is always welcome," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Google's simplified approach is a welcome change, making support easier to understand and procure. Google had a good support offering, but now it has an easy licensing and procurement approach. When the competition needs to copy it, we'll know its really successful."
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