Re-Aligning the NetAdvantage Bundle

For me, this raised the issue of why a company would make a major change like shaking up its product lines (which includes, for instance, handling customer who want to upgrade from the old package). The right answer seemed to be "ask them." And that led to Andrew Flick, product unit manager of NetAdvantage at Infragistics and these questions.

Peter Vogel: When did this change take effect? When did you start thinking about creating the NetAdvantage Ultimate bundle? And, as long as I'm asking: How long does it take to put a change like this into effect?

Andew Flick: We repackaged our NetAdvantage product suites in conjunction with our 2010 Volume 3 release in October 2010. We introduced NetAdvantage Ultimate, which includes all six Infragistics UI control toolsets -- Silverlight Data Visualization, WPF Data Visualization, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF Line of Business and Silverlight Line of Business.

The Ultimate suite really is 'ultimate' in that it provides our customers with the flexibility to move between platforms, maintain existing applications and create new ones on newer platforms.

For developers who are primarily doing Line of Business application development and using two or more controls, we repackaged NetAdvantage for .NET to include our four Line of Business UI control toolsets. Individual purchasing of each toolkit is now also available.

Before introducing our package rebranding to our customers, we did work for several months to ensure that our systems were ready to accommodate both the new and 'grandfathered' SKUs and that our documentation reflected the rebranded product suites.

PV: What drove this change?

AF: Our decision for this repackaging was driven by customer research and demand. As with every New Year, we reviewed our customer data, feedback and comments and evaluated how we could provide greater value to our customers and how our products could better help customers develop UI applications with the greatest user experiences possible.

PV: What do you see as the benefits for developers? For Infragistics?

AF: Customers who want all of our Infragistics controls in their toolbox for UI development on the web and the desktop, or enterprises that do not want to hassle with multiple licenses can now purchase or upgrade to NetAdvantage Ultimate. Because NetAdvantage Ultimate also includes our Data Visualization suites, it provides developers an opportunity to delve into the data visualization realm and communicate business intelligence data in a way that is visually meaningful.

PV: How do you see this change evolving (if it does evolve)? What impact will it have on existing Infragistics license owners now? At upgrade time?

AF: As we grew our UI toolkits to support new technologies and platforms, and market adoption ramped up it, made sense for us to rebrand our UI control suites to provide the most value to our customers. Current subscribers will be 'grandfathered' in, although we encourage our customers to take advantage of an upgrade package. As we introduce new NetAdvantage UI components, such as NetAdvantage Reporting, NetAdvantage for Web Developers, NetAdvantage for Mobile, our Ultimate subscribers will also get these new products to help them reach into new realms of development.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 01/31/2011