I work in enterprise software, and we have a fairly traditional sales and pricing model from what I know (a fair one, but nothing ground-breaking, aside from the fact that most of our licenses are yearly instead of perpetual). There are two things to consider.
First of all, as soon as you price as SaaS, you're seen as a cost center to be minimized, and you'll be able to charge far less even though you're providing a more valuable service by both developing the software AND running the IT. So ironically, it costs you more, and you can charge less for it. That just seems to be the way people evaluate these sorts of things: someone that would pay $500k per year for the license would probably balk at $500/user for 1000 users. Think of it as akin the app store effect: people are conditioned to SaaS being (relatively) cheap, but are used to enterprise software being expensive, so just like people expect iPhone apps to be irrationally cheap, they expect SaaS to somehow be cheaper for them than just buying the stuff.
Secondly, the software license is a small, small portion of their actual TCO of the software. A big company laying out $1 million a year for a software license might be spending 10x that in total to implement and integrate the system, do any necessary data extractions and transformations, train up new users, buy new hardware, etc.
I think about the best you can hope for is an enterprise vendor that delivers software that actually works and that doesn't price gouge you for doing it.
First of all, as soon as you price as SaaS, you're seen as a cost center to be minimized, and you'll be able to charge far less even though you're providing a more valuable service by both developing the software AND running the IT. So ironically, it costs you more, and you can charge less for it. That just seems to be the way people evaluate these sorts of things: someone that would pay $500k per year for the license would probably balk at $500/user for 1000 users. Think of it as akin the app store effect: people are conditioned to SaaS being (relatively) cheap, but are used to enterprise software being expensive, so just like people expect iPhone apps to be irrationally cheap, they expect SaaS to somehow be cheaper for them than just buying the stuff.
Secondly, the software license is a small, small portion of their actual TCO of the software. A big company laying out $1 million a year for a software license might be spending 10x that in total to implement and integrate the system, do any necessary data extractions and transformations, train up new users, buy new hardware, etc.
I think about the best you can hope for is an enterprise vendor that delivers software that actually works and that doesn't price gouge you for doing it.