Adobe Wants You To Buy ColdFusion 8 Enterprise

As you're no doubt aware, Adobe's announced the release of ColdFusion 8. What you may not have noticed, however, is the fact that Adobe has bumped the price of the Enterprise Edition from $5,999 to $7,499, and that there's an expanded list of features that are only supported in a "limited" fashion in the Standard Edition. Or not at all.

Here's the list.

	Standard Edition	Enterprise, Developer Editions
OS support	Windows®, Mac OS, Linux®	Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris™, AIX®
Built-in database drivers	Microsoft Access/ODBC, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Derby	Microsoft Access/ODBC, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Derby, DB2, Informix, Oracle, Sybase
Server Monitor/Multiserver Monitor	no	yes
J2EE application server deployment	no	yes
Enterprise manager — multiple server instances	no	yes
Administrator and RDS user and role management	no	yes
Enterprise server security (sandboxing)	no	yes
FIPS 140-compliant strong cryptology	no	yes
.NET assembly support	yes	yes
Event gateway architecture	Limited	yes
PDF and document services	Limited	yes
High-performance e-mail delivery	Limited	yes
Multi-threaded CFML (CFTHREAD)	Limited	yes
Microsoft Exchange Server integration	Limited	yes
Structured reporting	Limited	yes
On-demand presentation generation	Limited	yes

Not only are the old standbys missing from the Standard Edition like high-end database drivers for DB2, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, but apparently many of the new features touted as being in CF8 are only available in the Enterprise Edition, or are only available in the Standard Edition in a "limited" form.

Server monitoring and administrator and RDS user and role management seem to be missing completely from the Standard Edition.

PDF and document services, multi-threaded CFML (cfthread?), structured reporting, on-demand presentation generation, and other features are, however, listed as being "limited" and only completely available in the higher-price Enterprise version.

People, this is NOT the direction we need to be going.

There's already plenty of pressure from the Open Source camp and from Microsoft's .NET technologies, all providing seemingly equivilant web development solutions for free, as I illustrated in the ColdFusion, and the Mac vs. Windows Problem article.

Now, even the "affordable" version of ColdFusion appears to be crippled.

The basic rack-mount 2-CPU server I advise most of my clients to put in their racks costs about $2,500 all said and done... and they can buy THREE of them for the price of a single copy of CF Enterprise. Outfit three servers for $7,500, and you suddenly need $22,500 of software to go with them, for a total of $30,000 in up-front costs.

Get the same three servers and put .NET or PHP or Python or Ruby on them, and what's your total? The cost of the servers, or just $7,500.

Start outfitting an entire room full of CF boxes and those costs start to add up. Quickly.

As My Space and others have noticed.

It could be that I'm wrong, and all of the missing features are inconsequential. But I doubt both cases.

Today should be a day of celerbration, with all of us toasting the fact that a new version of ColdFusion has been released, and that for all intents and purposes it's alive and well. But instead, I'm afraid that the push for higher customer revenues has just driven another nail into the coffin.

Time will tell.

* * *

Note: If you're as dismayed as I am regarding Adobe's pricing scheme, then take the time to let them know. It's worth a try.

Comments

[Ed]

Totally agreed and as you can see here http://www.1smartsolution.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/7/30/ColdFusion-8-price-madness there are many people thinking same way.

[Adam Reynolds]

As I am mentioning elsewhere http://www.smithproject.org/

An open source free CFML engine. Go have a look. You may find it does 99% of what you want.

The limiting factor on the above is I believe that the threading is limited to one at a time.

Of note and I don't know if this is deliberate, have you noticed the http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/xml/rss.cfm?query=byMostRecent&languages=1 feed has stopped reporting posts from people who are discussing the CF price?

[David]

Ed,
"limited" does not refer to functionality, but volume of users using those features. From what I've read, if you need to surpass 100-150 concurrent users accessing these features on your site before you see performance issues.

Cheers,

Davo

[Ed]

David,
i don't know yet about other features, but for cfthreads there is said "CFTHREAD is limited to two additional spawned threads in Standard Edition", so it refer to functionality for sure :) and something tells me not only cfthreads are done this way.

[Michael Long]

There also Railo:

http://www.railo.ch/en/index.cfm

[David]

Ed,
That's two additional spawned threads, at one timed. I'm not saying that there aren't limitations - but the way people are going on about this, the standard version might as well be FrontPage.

Cheers,

David

[Jason Delmore]

I think you're taking the feature editioning the wrong way... all of the features work in Standard without any limitation to the functionality other than the number of threads allowed. You should look at the full edition matrix here http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf8_featurecomp.pdf. There are tons of great new features in 8 and they can all be used from Standard.

Hope that helps,
Jason

[Michael Long]

Jason: Good to know that the CF Product Manager drops by from time-to-time, but I'm afraid the matrix you suggested doesn't help your case. Restricting access of many of those services to a single thread limits their functionality and usefulness. I may want to use PDF generation, for example, but knowing only one user at a time can block all other similar requests... well, now I have a choice to make, don't I?

[bob]

I love Cf and am a CF developer since v1.5. I have never bought Enterprise because it has always been too expensive for my needs and now it is even more out of our reach. I would like to have the funtionality of Enterprise but the hefty price is a serious show stopper. I suspect Abode will get smart on this and come up with a more pragmatic pricing scheme. Please!

[Jeffrey V. Lemire]

We're a small hosting company and have been using CF since 2.0. We too have never moved to Enterprise becuase of cost.

I've never been to college and have learned everything by sheer will. At the time, ColdFusion was very easy to learn and enjoyed the "grass roots" environment that PHP and Ruby now commands. Even though CF wasn't free, it was affordable and I was able to implement it.

I then taught 3 other individuals how to use it (they now use PHP and .NET).

I truly love CF and am a strong advocate of its capabilities and my kudos go out to those who have designed it. It's sad that the bean counters seem to have lost the fact that they need to put CF in the hands of as may programmers as they possibly can. This is what will give CF the momentum it needs to survive in this competitive environment.

[Gus Denton]

I am a long term CF coder and I too feel Adobe is going for the Jugular. It's fine when I have customers who have big budgets and I can organise a good commercial CF hosting company.. However the smaller requests I get by sole trader types who want a couple of pages means I cannot use CF because hosting packages are SO expensive in comparison to PHP or .NET.. For some reason (Probably Licence costs) CF gets provided now as "Premium" hosting product, this mentality might just kill it in the foreseeable future

[Francis]

Dropping Oracle driver support is the killer for us. A third-party Oracle JDBC driver is available for about $1000, which is a 50% overhead on the $2000 price for CF8 Standard. Thanks for the great attitude to your long-time government customers, Adobe. We'll remember this when choosing technologies for future systems. In a climate of tight government budgets, you have excluded ColdFusion as an option with one stroke.