The economic crisis has ratcheted up the importance of understanding the total cost of ownership of enterprise software and what manufacturers are actually getting for their maintenance dollars. As customers begin to unravel their vendors’ product roadmaps with an eye toward saving money, understanding what happens at upgrade time is becoming increasingly important — and difficult.
At stake is not just the basic long-term cost of an enterprise software architecture, which is already a pretty big deal. More important is balancing those costs against an expected return on that investment in the form of innovation, productivity, and competitiveness. But vendors offer a dizzying array of brand new functions and upgrades to old functions that muddy the overall cost equation.
Among the many “gotchas” in understanding TCO and the upgrade dilemma are three key issues that can help define the problem and how your organization can protect the bottom line.
The first is that every vendor is struggling to define what is provided for free at upgrade time as part of maintenance and what is “net-new” innovation that a customer must pay for. The common wisdom is that your maintenance mega-bucks are paying to keep your software current; the reality is that “current” frequently does not include the new functionality you actually need.