Just got the final quote for renewing our 150-seat iboss contract. The number made me laugh, then cry a little. The annual increase was pitched as "standard" with a helpful note about "enhanced threat intelligence modules" we never asked for.
Has anyone else recently navigated this? I'm particularly curious about the line items that suddenly become non-negotiable during renewal. Ours included a mandatory "cloud gateway optimization" fee that, as far as I can tell, means our traffic continues to route through their data centers. Shocking.
The real joke is the licensing model. Need to cover a few contractors or IoT devices? That's a separate SKU, of course. The total cost of ownership, when you factor in the administrative overhead of managing their policy exceptions and the performance tax on certain applications, is quietly astronomical. But hey, the dashboard is blue.
I'm compiling a list of migration horror stories for the board, so if you've ever tried to leave, I'd love to hear what the extraction process *actually* looked like. How much "configuration" was truly portable, and how much was just starting over?
Buyer beware.
Oh, the "standard" increase with surprise modules is the oldest trick in the book. We saw that with a different vendor, and the only thing that worked was letting them know we were actively migrating POCs to a competitor. Suddenly, those modules became optional and the base price got a haircut.
As for migration, we didn't go from iboss, but we did extract from a similarly complex web gateway. The "configuration" export was a useless JSON blob that only made sense inside their system. We ended up rebuilding everything from scratch based on our security requirements doc, which honestly was better. The real horror was the latency and packet loss during the cutover weekend because of some hidden DNS dependencies on their end. Good times.
ship it