dbOrchestra FAQ

Why is your site more educational than marketing oriented?

We like to focus on presenting aspects of our product that our truly designed to increase your productivity. Why blabber about something when you can show the functionality in the product itself? The old picture is worth a thousand words analogy. Plus we can do this very easily. Everyone says there product can save you time and increase your ROI. Okay, prove it to me. This is our way of proving it to you. Buying a product is always "what's in it for you". Take a look at what we have and if it looks useful to you go for it.

The sages tell us we have 30 seconds or less when someone hits our landing page to engage them. While we realize this a reality, we also believe that people that have come to our site to look at our product could not possibly make an informed buying decision in half a minute. We want people to make an informed decision before they buy dbOrchestra. Our site has tons of information on our product and we expose most of our support materials as well. Many of you will spend a great deal of time delving into things that interest you.

Can you integrate your Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL versions?

Unfortunately no, though we have strategized at times what would be involved. There are so many differences between these DBMS's that it just not practical to do so without losing a great deal of the major functionality that sets us apart. We have been doing some development work invloving integration between versions.

Why different pricing for the Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL versions?

Initially we looked at the competition and their pricing models. The short answer is we have different pricing based upon what each market will bare. Our pricing in the SQL Server and Oracle versions is significantly less than the competition for a comparable product. There is a large population out there that just cannot afford $1000.00 per seat for software. Typically only the chosen few end up getting the software at that price. And, individuals are not going to typically pony up out of there own pocket $1000.00 for software for their job. Fact is, there are many people out there that really can benefit from this type of software. As for the MySQL, there is a product that has a free version and a pay version. They esitmate over 10 million users, but only 10,000 that are paying customers. Fact here is it is hard to sell after market products in the MySQL world. For what dbOrchestra-MySQL does $50 dollars a license is a great value.

Are you worried about the free open source tools that are available?

Not yet. There really is not anything out there in open source that can do what dbOrchestra can do. For whatever reason, the database development tools market does not have the same degree of high quality, robust open source software as other technology segments. Our feeling is use the best tool for the job. We use for pay software and free software. Our decisions for using software are based upon our needs and what the best tool for the job is.

Why do you not have Professional and Enterprise versions like everyone else?

Before putting our product into the mainstream market (we have been in the private label/OEM market for the past 7 years) we actually did have a Professional and Enterprise version. Early on we realized that differentiating our product like this was going to cause us huge operational and marketing costs that just did not make sense to us. We thought that it would be easier to make a single version. A significant cost of software is in after sales support. We decided it would be better to sell a single product at a very reasonable cost with a service model that looked more like what the open source community does. If enterprises or individual customers required more one on one support they could buy it from us post sale based on their individual needs.

Why should we buy from you? (Okay, no one asked us this one but we know they are thinking it)

First, we have a great product that can help you out and a very transparent website to show you such. Apart from this I would say our next biggest advantage is that because we are small. On many occassions when you have a support question or a request for an enhancement you end up talking to one of the principles in the company. In large companies your support ends up being farmed out to a third party and you might end up talking to someone that knows little to nothing about the product but is following a script doing front line support. In mid sized and large companies you just do not cannot get this level of access.

You last answer sounds good until you get too big...

This may end up being true. Certainly companies like Google are now feeling this reality, as did Microsoft when it really got big. We have had many discussions about how we stay small like this as we grow. It is something we talk about a lot. As we have grown this is a center piece topic.

Eric Matthews
CEO / Chief Software Designer