Cancel your maintenance contracts
January 7th, 2009 by Janus Boye
Here’s a tip that can save you some money in 2009: Cancel your maintenance and support (M&S) contracts with your CMS and enterprise portal vendors.
Often exceeding €100,000 annually for the large, global and complex organisations this is is a recurring cost, that many practitioners have automatically paid without questioning year after year.
Most practitioners actually receive very little in return for the money. Many don’t even involve support when the need is there; instead they work with their local implementation partner. Those who do work with support very often find it to be a patchy experience. Included in an M&S subscription are often also minor and major updates, but many organisations are too busy to install and use. Why not skip the upgrades this year?
Needless to say, M & S revenues are significant sources of profit for most software vendors; open source and commercial alike. For commercial vendors the amounts typically vary between 15% – 30% of the license price, while open source vendors have different variable rates. Either way, there is an annual cost for you the buyer.
Cancelling your maintenance contracts might sound like risky advice. I’ve talked to someone earlier this week who considered their M&S fees an insurance policy of sorts; something, which ideally they would never need, but which they choose to pay for in case something goes wrong. In my humble opinion, that is the wrong way of looking at your software maintenance contract. A normal insurance policy will help you reduce risk in case something goes wrong and should provide you with a financial compensation. When something goes wrong with your CMS or portal installation, your vendor normally attempts to fix the issue. It might take 2 weeks or more, but you will certainly not get any money back or compensation for any losses. Consider also the much cheaper alternative of signing up local knowledgeable technical consultants who will always be eager to help when you have a problem.
If you feel that you are not getting much value out of your vendor relationship, why are you still renewing your software M&S contracts? You could probably spend your money better elsewhere?
January 8th, 2009 at 10:07 am
We – as a CMS software vendor – believe this might be a dangerous advice to follow. In a world where hackers get smarter by the minute, it is fundamental to keep your CMS platform up to date. Who would opt out of Windows Update or terminate the Anti-Virus subscription?
Furthermore, it is normal practice for software vendors to require, that customers opting in for maintenance subscription after having opted out for some time, have to pay the subscription fee for the intermediate period as well, which eliminates the saving.
So while cancelling the software maintenance contract might offer some short term comfort it will usually end up being the more expensive and insecure option.
Jens Handberg
CEO – Tangora Software A/S
January 8th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Dear Jens,
Thanks for contributing your point of view.
Yes, I agree entirely that security updates are important, but from my perspective, I don’t understand why vendors charge money for this. Customers should no longer blindly accept this.
Microsoft has got this right with Windows Update, which is a free of charge service to everybody with a valid Windows license. Would you be willing to pay for access to Windows Update? Imagine the PR nightmare for Microsoft if they started charging a subscription fee for Windows Update. Journalists and bloggers would probably say that Microsoft build insecure software and now users have to pay extra so that Microsoft can fix their own bugs.
Finally, I have also heard that some vendors are less flexible when it comes to welcoming back customers who have previously opted out of a maintenance subscription. Customers should remember that in a tougher financial climate vendors are likely to become much more flexible.
Janus
January 9th, 2009 at 9:32 am
I agree with Janus on this one. While hackers might get smarter, it’s still us as vendors who’re responsible for any potential security holes. The metaphor of Windows Update or a virus subscription doesn’t hold water – the first is free, the second is a system designed for protection. The correct metaphor would be any offline vendor producing a product that are shipped with a vulnerability. Could you imagine Toyota charging to repair brakes that wasn’t build properly or a toy producer not recalling toxic products?
When a software product has a vulnerability the responsibility is all on the vendor. Period.
As a vendor you could – no, should – offer free security patches. With a proper system architecture and build processes, it’s relatively easy to subtract these patches out of a version branch, meaning that customers gets the security updates but not any other improvements (that could be reserved for the maintenance fee/service subscription/cash-cow or whatever it’s called).
Using fear as a sales argument is unhealthy, especially combined with the traditional closeness from many closed-source vendors about security issues. You rarely have open access to reports on vulnerability issues on a system. If security is the main argument for a maintenance contract, I believe that it would make much more sense for users if they could see how many times the past couple of years the system they’re considering has been vulnerable.
Niels Hartvig,
Founder, umbraco (an open source Microsoft ASP.NET based Web CMS)
January 9th, 2009 at 10:34 am
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January 9th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
“When a software product has a vulnerability the responsibility is all on the vendor. Period.”
So by that rationale Microsoft should keep fixing Internet Explorer 1.0 on Windows 95 vulnerabilities forever and free of charge, right? Well, they don’t. I believe we have to look at product life cycles to determine when it is possible to phase out support completely. And whether we like it or not, the CMS market is still in its infancy with most products undergoing rapid development cycles, producing many versions within a small timeframe. If we look at ourselves – or Umbraco for that matter – the software have gone through several major releases over the past few years. Microsoft, however, have had only two major Windows releases this millennium. And those are the ones currently being supported by Microsoft.
Jens Handberg
CEO – Tangora Software A/S
January 9th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Regarding Microsoft they’re still supporting Windows 2000 until 2010, so I guess that’s not the comparison you’re seeking
If any software vendor believes that it’s the best strategy to only supporting the very latest version for vulnerabilities and thereby demanding a “software maintenance contract” for any practioners running critical solutions on their platform, I’m convinced that it’s a path to failure as practioners gets smarter at choosing and buying platforms.
Software Maintenance contracts are mostly cashcows and is more and more used as an instrument to lower initial pricing on products to keep up in a competitive market. When fear becomes a sales argument it’s a pretty clear sign that the going is getting tough, but very ironic to justify a mandatory maintenance contract by saying that the product you’re about to buy might be vulnerable – that made my day
Just my $0.02
January 9th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
> If we look at ourselves – or Umbraco for that matter
Please don’t compare Tangora with umbraco in this matter. We take our users very seriously and have spend a big deal of resources making sure that they’re able to upgrade between all our versions the past five years. Beyond that we’re still committed to security patches to the last two major releases for the ones who don’t upgrade. Free of change of course.
We’re confident that this is what practioners will expect and we’re happy to set an above industry average here.
January 14th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Cancel your software maintenance contract?…
Do you have a support organization that is solid enough to cancel your content systems maintenance contract?
……
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