Maintenance madness

IT MANAGERS have it all wrong. Most believe that software maintenance programs are supposed to protect their investment in the software they’ve installed, but what’s actually being maintained is the software publisher’s revenue stream.

Our recent discussions about questionable maintenance practices prompted many readers to respond with horror stories of their own. Such practices as threatening to withhold bug fixes from nonmaintenance customers, playing games with new software releases so that maintenance customers don’t get them for free, and overcharging for unavailable or inept technical support seem widespread. So is a growing frustration among readers over maintenance schemes that cost more and more while providing less and less.

“Once upon a time, long, long ago, companies took pride in their work and endeavored to maintain high standards rather than income streams,” one reader lamented. “Today, it’s simply a bean-counter cost analysis, where the nuisance impact on users is calibrated to minimize costs and customer defections. … You suggested that perhaps maintenance revenue provides software publishers an appropriate incentive to devote resources to fixing their bugs, but quite the opposite is true. Maintenance revenue provides an inappropriate incentive to release buggy software.”

Many readers said they are now refusing to annually pay 20 percent or more of the product price for maintenance. “It may be reasonable to be at 15 percent of purchase price (it is never reasonable to be at 20 percent of purchase price) for young, developing products since we can expect new functions fairly frequently,” one veteran IT manager wrote. “But for mature products, I think 5 to 8 percent is the maximum justified, since the only upgrades are those that are ‘self inflicted’ due to the inability to write software that survives operating system updates and mostly don’t add any value to anybody but the software companies.”

While using maintenance as a revenue generator is clearly an industrywide phenomenon, readers did mention a couple of companies more often than might be expected. One was WQuinn, now known as Precise-WQuinn. Several longtime fans of the company’s Quota Advisor product feel WQuinn’s current maintenance polices force them to pay too much for support they don’t really need while not providing new releases of the product.

“The issue with their maintenance program is that it is for phone support only and does not include product updates,” wrote one reader who noted WQuinn’s Priority Care program costs 20 percent of the $1,295 purchase price per copy of the software. “We own a dozen copies. As a result, I have been paying over $3,000 per year and do not have access to the current product. … I have only had one call in the past two years to their tech support, and they couldn’t resolve the issue. At this point, we don’t see any need to renew maintenance at all unless their policy changes.”

Another WQuinn customer encountered a minimum $300 charge for a maintenance option that should have cost only $155 and was also told that without maintenance he would not have access to bug fixes. A WQuinn spokesman confirms the $300 minimum charge but says the company makes all of its bug fixes available for free download, and that does appear to be the case. A WQuinn Web site that states patches and updates are not available on per-incident support calls is mistaken, the spokesman said, and will be changed. And while it’s true that maintenance customers are not automatically entitled to major updates, the spokesman said that they do receive upgrade discounts.

Of course, customers who feel they aren’t getting their money’s worth on a particular maintenance program can always drop it at renewal time, but some software companies even try to make that an expensive proposition. Veritas has drawn the ire of some readers by calling them when their Vsupport maintenance program is about to expire to point out the company’s Reinstatement Fee policy. Veritas’ support policy document says that if “support is not renewed or was never originally procured, a reinstatement fee will be assessed … equal to the support fee for the period in which the Licensed Software was not under support plus 25 percent of such fee.”

Readers who felt they were paying too much for the quality of support Veritas was delivering reacted badly to these phone calls. “I find this type of policy to be a form of extortion,” wrote one reader whose company had been disappointed with the support it received for the $10,000 paid annually on Veritas software maintenance. “Now I don’t have any doubts that I do not wish to pay Veritas another penny for support, which they don’t really provide. Furthermore, I am reconsidering future use of Veritas products in our company’s solutions.”

Veritas officials didn’t see why anyone would be upset. “The reinstatement fee is a normal business practice to cover the cost of any product upgrades that may have occurred since the contract lapsed,” a Veritas spokesman wrote in response to my queries about the policy. “Because of the value of our support and maintenance contracts, we encourage our customers to invest in a long-term relationship with Veritas.”

Investing in a long-term relationship with a software vendor is exactly what IT managers have always thought they were doing when they signed up for maintenance. But threatening to hit them with penalty fees or withholding bug fixes or any of these other common practices hardly seems like the actions of companies that have anything but their own short-term interests in mind. It’s time IT professionals take a hard look at the value proposition of maintenance contracts and do a little short-term thinking of their own.