When it comes to pricing out how companies and teams use software-as-a-service (SaaS), consumers aren’t often given much of a choice—but that could be changing due to market forces and an uncertain economy.

Pricing models are usually based on a per-user, level of consumption fee—in theory, effectively allowing the provider to let some lower-level users subsidize higher-level users by setting the cost near the median. Per-user pricing, Gartner analyst Stephen White told IT Brew, is the industry norm due in large part to convenience.

“Per-user license commitment, regardless of whether the user makes effective use of it—consumes it—it still costs the organization the same amount,” White said. “That’s by far the predominant model; there is a limited degree to which consumption billing has progressed.”

The predictability of the consumer user pricing model is in some ways a benefit to both vendor and consumer, White told IT Brew, making it seem unlikely that there’s a major shift coming anytime soon. But as RBC software analyst Rishi Jaluria told Insider, business models tend to grow in a more consumer-friendly direction over time, and SaaS is unlikely to be any different. Giving customers the ability to only pay for what they use is a logical next step.

Read more here.—EH

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Want to make changes to your career? The help desk does more than solve customers’ problems. It is often seen as the first stop for the newbie who wants more IT career options.

“The help desk is the number-one place where you’re going to get the experience and get the exposure and figure out where it is you want to go with your career,” Randy Gross, CISO and chief innovation officer at the trade association CompTIA, told IT Brew last year.

But what if you’re a help-desk veteran who’s done fielding questions about broken printers and forgotten passwords, and still doesn’t know where to go next? For cert-less, degree-less IT employees, the next step may be especially challenging.

Three IT consultants spoke to IT Brew and offered help for the help-desker on the move.

The responses below have been edited for length and clarity.

Seth Robinson, VP, industry research, CompTIA: As companies are beginning to focus on standalone, dedicated teams [for] cybersecurity, or software development, or data management analysis, the help desk touches all of those things and can act as a launching pad into any of those areas…Choose the path that seems the most interesting, and then identify the skill gaps, because there are definitely going to be some and there are a lot of different ways that you can close those skill gaps. There are a lot of different training programs out there, and certification programs.

So, that will align with: What’s your interest? How much is your company willing to invest in your career development? What types of programs does your company offer for career development? There’s a lot out there to consider, but there is also no shortage of pathways that this person could take, starting from the help desk.

Keep reading here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $3.3 billion. That’s the amount of investment-fraud losses reported to the FBI in 2022, a year-over-year increase of 183%. (Wired)

Quote: “Whenever they fix one glitch, they seem to create another one.”—a member of a WhatsApp group of over 300 migrants, referring to the US’s “CBP One” app built to support asylum requests (Rest of World)

Read: How hackers are breaking into Canada’s farms. (Financial Post)

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