HRIS

Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With Vendor Threats To Charge For Back Maintenance Fees by R "Ray" Wang

Four Common Customer Scenarios Will Trigger Vendors To Raise The Back Maintenance Fee Discussion

Back maintenance fees describe the amount an organization would have paid for maintenance if they would have continued to pay the usual stream required to access support, bug fixes, patches, and upgrade rights.  As economic conditions have worsened, many organizations have turned to self-support, third party maintenance (3PM), or dropped support.  Discussions with 43 enterprise software customers reveal four common scenarios:

1. Scenario 1: Self supporting customers looking to upgrade to next release. Customers (44.19% n=19/43) in these scenarios typically run mature systems and are in businesses that do not face dynamic change .  They stopped paying maintenance years ago and rarely make major changes to the system.
   
   Average: Select ratingPoorOkayGoodVery GoodExcellent

   Average: 5 (1 vote)

 “The bottom isn’t falling out of the HR technology market, according to a recent survey from the International Association for Human Resources Information Management professional group.”

Look, I as much as anyone would love to believe these findings, but let’s be realistic. If companies are letting employees go and are not meeting earning estimates by large margins, can those in the HR software industry be optimistic enough to assume these companies won’t spend any less money on HR technology? Sorry, but I don’t buy the results of the survey; no matter how much I want to.

When it comes to surveys it’s all about what questions are asked and how the replies are presented.

“42% of the nearly 210 respondents (nearly 210 respondents; does that mean 209?) reported that their human resource information budgets will remain the same in 2009 and in 2008, the association said in a release Friday. Another 21 percent of participants said budgets will increase by an average of 23 percent, while 37 percent said their budgets will decrease by a median of 15 percent.”

So, I guess based on this information all of us in the HR software technology industry should breathe a huge sigh of relief.  Not so fast my fellow HR industry pros. Let’s take a closer look at the question and the numbers.

I have a few questions:

Before I start this article, it’s important to note that I consider myself to be an independent who leans right. That being said, I will try my best to present the most unbiased HRMS software article possible. At this point, I think we have all had plenty of political spin so I don’t need to add any more.