Thursday, April 21, 2011

Will Cloud Computing Change Volume Discounts?

A U.K. cloud computing service provider has become the first supplier to deal with the entire U.K. government as a single customer. Huddle said it has developed common terms and conditions and a pricing model for all of its business with government.

That implies a level of volume discounts and standardization of delivery that would have been difficult for suppliers in the past, given the greater labor intensity of legacy implementation methods. Volume discounts are standard in just about any business. What is new, in the software business, is the potential scale of the buyer base that might be aggregated for purposes of pricing discounts.

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