Tokenisation in MFT
As we explore more innovative approaches to MFT licensing, tokenisation has emerged as a potential way to better align price with value. Rather than tying the cost of add-on capabilities to transfer volumes, token-based licensing would allow our customers to pay only for the outcomes they actually use – whether that’s monitoring for outages, tracking time-critical files, or triggering specific functions. We discuss what this could mean for you and the value it could potentially deliver if the concept comes to fruition.
Tokenisation is an idea we’ve borrowed from AI licensing models when exploring new creative ways to license our products. While this might sound like a wild card, that’s the entire idea of taking a think tank approach to innovation.
Currently, MFT has a simple pricing structure based on the number of transfers per month.
So, you pay for what you get from the system.
If someone has a million transfers per month, are they getting any more value from Workbench than someone who's doing 20,000 transfers per month?
Not necessarily.
However, if you add any of our bolt-ons, like Enterprise Pack or Workbench, you pay a percentage uplift on the base subscription cost. This part of the pricing model has stimulated a bit of debate internally – and we’ve discussed at length whether that's the right way to price the additional products. Why? The question raised is if someone has a million transfers per month, are they getting any more value from Workbench, for example, than someone who's doing 20,000 transfers per month? The answer, of course, is not necessarily. The value of Workbench doesn't multiply in the same way that the number of transfers does. The value remains static, regardless of transfer numbers. Agreeing on this point, the challenge for us has been to find ways to deliver value at a fair price for all through a more innovative approach to licensing.
One idea under discussion is tokenisation, which is the idea that you only pay for the value of the output from the solution. To enable this, we would keep the paid-for transfers in MFT, but Enterprise Pack and Workbench would move to a model whereby customers buy tokens, which they spend when they want to use specific functions from within either product (in other words, they could cherry-pick the functions they value instead of needing to pay for the ones they never use).
The upshot would be that customers consume tokens from their prepaid pool as needed in exchange for a quantifiable outcome, such as monitoring an MFT device for an outage or the arrival of a time-critical file. Each action and outcome would attract a different value, and tokens could be moved from one product to another – giving you more control over usage and budget.
Tokenisation would allow customers to cherry-pick the functions they value instead of needing to pay for the ones they never use.
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