I have not heard of any VARs
"VAR" = Value Added Reseller. See Resellers and Reselling Manifold. Those pages set forth the foundation for a) an end user looking for a reseller and b) a VAR looking to use Manifold in value-added sales. The bottom line to all that is there is no niche in the ecosystem for resellers who do not add significant value. Significant value usually means a vertical application of some sort where a Manifold runtime is the engine, and "significant value" means the application is sold for vastly more than the cost of the $50 or $100 runtime license that powers it. There are applications out there based on Manifold which cost $50,000 per year to license. Manifold does not require such VARs to disclose they use Manifold. Human nature being what it is such VARs do not have an incentive to tell customers their $50,000 (or even $5,000) purchase is running on a $50 license. Reseller niches that provide more visible resale for Manifold don't normally exist because Manifold will not artificially enforce a distributor/dealer model. Given that anybody on the planet can order factory-direct from Manifold online, there are limited niches to provide value added in terms of traditional retail activities, like explaining the product line to folks who cannot self-serve by reading the website. For the most part, those niches are occupied by resellers who serve the needs of organizations, the classic example being servicing a procurement process that cannot buy online with a secure credit card, offering paid support plans that align with the needs of a given organization and so on. Such resellers have to be careful, since the world is full of people who are happy to burn a reseller's time for many hours and then they turn around and buy factory-direct online. It's a situation that retailers in many industries are confronting, as numerous bricks and mortar stores around the world are discovering: people come into a physical showroom, look at all the models, spend endless hours with salespeople taking the pros and cons of various models... and then they order online from Amazon to save a few bucks. That's true of everything from TVs to running shoes. I guess there is also some culture shock going on as disruptive price/performance levels appear which are radically different than what was the norm in the past. Many big organizations/government agencies are using software that they expect to cost tens of thousands of dollars per seat for what 9 or 8 can do for a few hundred per seat or less. There are DBMS products in the 9 space that are not anywhere near as parallel or powerful as 9 which cost over $10,000 per year per seat, for example, and the very high price of a full ESRI suite is well-known. Those prices and the mind-bending high cost of the sales apparatus that sells them into big organizations have understandably habituated users in those organizations to a model where a sales guy comes in and presents new products to them and so on. It's a very different model than, say, walking up to an In-n-Out burger counter and deciding whether you want a vanilla shake with that super-fresh double-double cheeseburger, handing over a few bucks cash and you're done. The ability to get all the power and more of a zillion dollar data tool for the price of a burger, so to speak, means a real change in the procurement process. I think that's for the better, more power for vastly less price, but for all that betterness there's going to be a time of transition as big organizations figure out how to best take advantage of the new levels of price/performance that are available. All that is OK. We are going to keep pushing on that imbalance, trying to lower real prices even lower with even more performance. Big fun for all! :-)
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