maintenance fees
Dealing With Vendor Threats To Charge For Back Maintenance Fees
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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:
- 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.