[AusNOG] Vendors back charging on support and maintenance.

[Brad Peczka]

Let's look at this using the context of your customer who hasn't been paying maintenance for a period of time.

During the time where your customer hasn't had a support contract, the vendor has been developing fixes, enhancements, and revisions to the software used on the product. The vendor may have also developed hardware fixes to the product that are incorporated into the manufacturing process as a V02, V03, etc, product - no functionality change, but improved reliability. The Cisco Catalyst 3850 status button is one I can recall easily; I'm sure there are others, and these updated products will reach the RMA pool after a period of time.

So - sure, from a customer side there's no problem. You pay the fee, you get the support. However, from the vendor side, the absence of maintenance fees from customers who instead pay for maintenance on a last minute/just in time basis essentially means they're freeloading off the development work that has occurred while they were outside of support. After-sales fixes throughout a product life are, to a large extent, paid for by customers with continuous maintenance contract, instead of customers who take the cheap route.

As a customer, I hate paying for maintenance on gear that is as solid as a rock and unlikely to fail... but I'm exceedingly grateful that when I hit a bug, the vendor often already has an image with the fix for the bug that I can download and run. Or, if I have a hardware fault, I get a V08 model to replace my V01 model, with all of the engineering changes included. I also hate the idea of back-paying maintenance that I'll can never use just to get a device back under support, but that's the policy of the vendor and I as the customer have made a conscious decision to use that vendors product in preference to another for whatever reason I deemed best at the time.

TL;DR = Support has a cost for both the customer and vendor. Pay your share, buy cold spares, or change to a vendor that better aligns with your commercial expectations.

Regards,
-Brad.
________________________________________
From: AusNOG <ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net> on behalf of Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au>
Sent: Thursday, 26 April 2018 1:41 PM
To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Vendors back charging on support and maintenance.

On Wed, 2018-04-25 at 00:07 +0000, Nikolas Geyer wrote:
> Yes, it’s pretty standard. It’s to stop people running hardware
> without a maintenance contract and only buying one when they need to
> do, for example, a RMA.

Sorry, why is that a problem? If they pay the support fee, they should
get the benefits. If they are not using the benefits, why should they
pay the fee? On the flip side, they may not have paid support for ten
years, but they also have not been costing the vendor anything.

I see no problem with someone waiting until it is needed before paying
the support fee.

Am I missing something? What *is* the "vendor side of the problem"?

Regards, K.

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