This particular product is often used by the SMB types. This changes things a bit. While I disagree with paying for signature updates you didn't use (It's a service, and I don't care about their fixed costs, I went into it knowing I'd have a license for the signatures as they were expired), I do understand where they are coming from for software/firmware development. Unfortunately, they don't decouple the two. However, this particular vendor is bad in a market where gear often passes hands or goes lapsed for years. After a certain point (IE: 1 yr), you shouldn't have to true-up. This particular company makes your 3-year lapsed appliance pay for 3 years of missed updates, at which point you might as well just throw it in the garbage. Same thing with my license plates -- if they go for 11 months or less, I have to "true up". If I put a car in storage for over a year, I can purchase a new registration. On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:04 AM, James M Keller <jmkeller@houseofzen.org>wrote:
On 12/21/2011 3:22 PM, David Swafford wrote:
In my position within the enterprise vertical, backdating to the expiration (not the payment date) seems to be the norm. Cisco does this on SmartNet, as does SolarWinds and a number of other vendors I've worked with. We don't typically slip on the dates intentionally, but our procurement and legal groups have a habit of fighting over wording on the contracts.
David.
Having worked in the past at a shop that sold managed support agreements for software we sold - the overhead for staffing and code and blacklisting type data sets are spread out in the yearly support agreement. A lapsed customer has not funded the delta changes in code and data set from lapsed data to renewal date, but will get to take advantage of the work. While a new customer also will not fund these on a new starting contract, that is normally considered some cost of acquiring new business.
Now in some cases on the other end of the transaction I've found it cheaper to buy 'new' then it was to 'true up' the support. I haven't found a vendor that wouldn't go that route, even if it involved getting some escalation on the sales side first. At that point it's the cost of customer retention vs new business that the vendor needs to worry about. However if you are happy with the product, and the renewal isn't more then 'new' purchases - we all shouldn't be baulking having to 'true up' contracts.
-- --- James M Keller