You can play hard ball with your CMS vendor

You are doing your readers a great disservice by comparing software maintenance agreements to an appliance service contract. Appliances don't have bugs for which fixes are created. They don't have updates and upgrades which add functionality and fix yet more known problems. Content management, more than many types of software, have enormous dependencies on 3rd party products such as authoring tools, publishing tools, translation tools, imaging systems, databases, server OS's, desktop OS's, browsers etc. Everytime one of these 3rd party vendors comes out with a new version, the CMS vendor must test, modify and certify compatibility. Without a maintenance contract the customer is forced to stay on current version of everything or pay for upgrades to get compatibility with new versions of other tools in use.

Sure, challenging economic times are an opportunity to revisit costs and renegotiate where feasible. However, putting your entire system at risk to save a few thousand bucks is simply bad business.

Would you suggest, since most term life insurance buyers never collect on the insurance, that it's good family policy to go uninsured? I doubt it.

Good point, but I must pass the buck and point you to Mr. Boye's article. He suggests they are are considerably more than a few thousand dollars. I quote:

"Often exceeding €100,000 annually for the large, global and complex organisations this is is a recurring cost, that many practitioners have automatically paid without questioning year after year.

Most practitioners actually receive very little in return for the money. Many don’t even involve support when the need is there; instead they work with their local implementation partner. Those who do work with support very often find it to be a patchy experience... "

Mr. Boye also takes exception to your comparison to an insurance policy when he writes:

"A normal insurance policy will help you reduce risk in case something goes wrong and should provide you with a financial compensation. When something goes wrong with your CMS or portal installation, your vendor normally attempts to fix the issue. It might take 2 weeks or more, but you will certainly not get any money back or compensation for any losses..."

So maybe my appliance comparison was a little thin, but I think that Mr. Boye makes a valid point.

Ron

I don't agree that you put your entire system at risk if you cancel your maintenance contract. Also, I suggest buyers be careful of vendors trying to sell their contracts on fear or intimidation. Remember that 2009 is a buyers market and most vendors are very hungry for your revenue!

If you go ahead and cancel your maintenance contract, you can still contact the vendor if something go wrong and they will still help you. Even if they wont you can always find a consultancy to help you. If an issue is even remotely security related, you can expect that the vendor will provide you the patch free of charge, just like Microsoft does with Windows Update.

It is fair to charge for a new version with new functionality, but vendors act like cowboys when they try to charge money for fixing their own bugs.

Hi Janus:
Thanks for adding your voice to the debate. You're dead on. Customers shouldn't have to pay for bug fixes. It's a crazy system and you deserve credit for calling it out for what it is. By the way, I'm very pleased to have you here. Your blog is a fantastic source of content management information and I highly recommend it to anyone covering content management.

Ron