More and more people are discovering that WebGUI not only bests the competition on features, but especially on cost of deployment, both in time and money.

CMS Watch and CMS Wire both have recently been talking about how expensive Microsoft Sharepoint is. They're also saying that many vendors in our space are slashing licensing fees to get customers. Meanwhile dozens of organizations every month are realizing that $0 is much better than $100,000 when it comes to WebGUI and licensing fees. You see, we don't have to slash licensing fees because we think licensing fees are plain ridiculous, so we give our software away for free, including the source code.

We have a client that needed to build out a web site (news and product info), intranet (Sarbanes Oxley tracking, legal, and hr tools), and extranet (sales and RMAs). They had quite a few custom applications to develop. In the beginning they estimated it for Microsoft Sharepoint and Oracle Portals. MS Sharepoint came in at around $1.8 million (and that's with some super discounted licensing from Microsoft) and Oracle Portals came in just over $2 million. Then WebGUI came into the picture. Ultimately it divided the company in half, one deciding to build it out with Oracle Portals and the other with WebGUI. 

On the WebGUI / Plain Black side we had finished their core apps in about 8 months. And we finished all of their phase two and three goals in 21 months (real time, dev time was much less). The total cost for their full suite of intranet apps including hosting with us: $314,000.

On the Oracle Portals side, it took 3 years (36 months) to get the baseline set of apps completed so they could launch the site. It has now been 5 years since the project began and they have not completed the set of apps we completed in only 21 months. Total cost of the project to date: $3,210,000.

So why is there such a discrepancy? (See the attached charts.) Part of it is in licensing costs. WebGUI costs $0 for licensing, and the Oracle Portals solution had licensing fees of $260,000. Another is hardware: the Oracle Portals division decided to host it in house and they spent $40,000 in hardware costs (not including power, internet bandwidth, data center space, replacement parts, backups, or cooling), where as the WebGUI division hosted their cluster with us for $14,000 per year. And finally our development processes are evolutionary; we build a base system and continuously add to it. Whereas the contractors implementing Oracle Portals wanted all of the specifications for everything up front. The problem with that is that the business didn't know everything it wanted, and requirements constantly changed through-out the project. Since our process allows the users to see and play with a base system, once they see what they have, they can more easily determine what is missing. Therefore the whole process moves along much more quickly even if there is some redevelopment work

Given the expensive state of our industry, it's no wonder that WebGUI wins from a financial perspective. And given what the analysts are saying the in the articles mentioned above, we're going to keep on winning for years to come.