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software maintenance renewal ?

hello @all,

our software maintenance renewal is running out this month. so i received the yearly solarwinds reminder mail. but this time, with an unfortunate surprise on a monday morning :
the annual support fee for orion slx has increased from 1995$/year to 4195$/year !
frankly : are you guys nuts ?
why this incredible increase ? this is way too much...

regards
josch

mihi est propositum in taberna mori

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vhcato

Josch,

I feel your pain. Based on the new pricing model, and the fact that the Wireless Management Packs now have an annual maintenance cost, the cost of our next renewal will increase by 275%. When I asked SW about it, the response was that the pricing was being adjusted to more closely align with industry standards, which is for maintenance costs to be equal to approximately 20% of the cost of the product.

In general, I would say that even that is a bargain when considering the functionality and price of the products (which have gone up as well), but this also has to be weighed against some of the problems that have plagued the new releases of software. With that being said, I think that along with the increased price comes an increased level of expectation, and each individual customer must determine if those expectations are being met before stroking a check for maintenance.

Just my thoughts...
Vic

fbailey

I was thinking about putting in a claim for injury. when I read my renewal quote I fell off my chair. Ours has increased to £5000 per year

BryanBecker

I can understand them raising the prices but I think common courtesy is to notify the customers that a change was coming...not just dropping a bomb like this when you go to renew it.

BB

Mithrilhall

I couldn't agree more with BryanBecker. A notice that the price was going to go up would have been nice.

This actually might push us away from SolarWinds (it's not my decision). I would love to keep using Orion but the people above me are not happy with the price increase and have started looking at other software.

vhcato

I remember getting an email a while back stating that they were going to begin charging a maintenance fee for the wireless management packs, and I seem to think they may have mentioned that there would be additional changes as well, but I can't exactly recall. I actually learned of the exact cost of our next renewal as a result of discussions with SW following their inquiry about us purchasing maintenance for the WMP on the anniversary of our original purchase date. After just having paid to renew maintenance on all of our SW products for the next year, they agreed to wait until our next renewal to charge us for the WMP's.

I know they are undergoing a number of changes (growing pains), so I suppose some of this is expected. I'm curious as to exactly what all has changed..? Haven't seen anything on the forum from Don lately. Is he still around?

Seraphym

well, we use two different monitoring programs here.
we use orion primarily to keep historical data of nodes availability and traffic charts. it's our backup alarming system.
but with this increase in maintenance fee... we are thinking about kicking it out of our data centers.

on top of all, i submitted a bug which heavily affects all our custom views. after 4 weeks without a reply from support (exept : "yes, it's a bug."), i asked about a workaround. reply :

"This bug has been assigned to our sustaining team and currently is not scheduled for a specific release.

A work around you may try is a different SQL statement which does not select all nodes-and or change the ranges of IP addresses that you are querying."

to me, this reads like "yeah, we know, but we have no clue and no motivation."

our maintenance contract runs out this may. if we get no bugfix for this problem, we surely won't continue to use orion. sad, but true.

mihi est propositum in taberna mori

Dal

This actually might push us away from SolarWinds (it's not my decision). I would love to keep using Orion but the people above me are not happy with the price increase and have started looking at other software.

Same here. Maintenance costs are way too expensive to justify year after year.

torrielw

I have the same feedback from my management team. We're actually bringing online another product incoming months. (aargh!)

Mars

Here are some quotes from Solarwinds reports and documentation:

"Define and implement a solid network management environment - without sacrifising their budgets"

"Choosing a product can be a time consuming and labour intensive activity, even though the number of vendors and service providers of the small and midsize market is relative small. The reason for this is that IT management frameworks with robust functionality do not scale down in price, while price-accessible point solutions are no longer adequate to maintain efficient IT operations.
To date, cost hase been the primary driver in the small- to midsize-business market for making toolset desisions, to the detriment of functionality."

I can go on with quoting out of solarwinds documentation where time after time the low pricing is one of the selling points. An increase of over 100% is in this case very hard to explain.

PS i am not dissatisfied about the product bud i am getting complains from the Business as well.

Greetings,

Mars

Time to start the discussion again???

Mail we have got last week...
"On April 1st, 2010 SolarWinds adjusted the pricing tiers for Orion Network Performance Monitor. As an existing customer, we wanted to notify you about the upcoming adjustment to your annual maintenance renewal and extend a six-month grace period where you’ll be able to renew your license at the previous rates until September 30th, 2010."

I like the statement later in that mail:
"Orion NPM has not increased prices in over 3 years, despite dramatic increases in product functionality over that time period."

In 2007 a maintenance fee increase of over 110% ($1,995 to $4,195)
In 2010 they raised it again this time 20% ($4,195 to $4,995)

So probably for that timeframe not but in general an increase of 130% just outside that window...
For the increase in product functionality... I will not argue but....
In 2007 I was at NPM 8.5.1 SP2 and now 9.5.1 when I talk to managers this would be an increase of 1 version in 3 years in stead of "we try to deliver Orion twice a year"

Taking in account that a NPM slx version costs $16.000,- when they have an sales offer ($20.000 if no offer..) we will probably not extend our maintenance anymore and buy the new version in 3 or 4 years time and save some stress on the updates, as we lost functionality over a couple of months when we where upgrading to new SP's or versions.

FormerMember

I want to make a couple of comments. First off, we don't expect anyone to be thrilled about a price increase, but we have tried to ease the change. We've provided a grace period for customers to renew at old prices for six months since we know it's difficult to budget for this kind of change.

I've been here since before the last price increase, and in that time, In that same period, we also rolled the wireless module into NPM at no charge. We also made pollers for modules free. Most importantly, we have added quite a bit of functionality, and we've expanded the engineering team, so the pace of change continues to increase.

Regarding the versions, we may just have to disagree on what a version is. If you're only counting the "left of dot" releases as a version, then I suppose you're right. But as one of the people who decides on our numbering, I can assure you that we don't count it that way because a ".1" can pack just as big a punch as an "x.0" release. The choice of numbering is an attempt to communicate something about the release, but it's definitely a mix of art, science, and marketing.

We raised prices in December 2006 specifically so that we could invest more in the product. Before that, the engineering team was a "Simpson's handful" of engineers (i.e., no need for the fifth finger) and progress was very slow. In December 2006, we shipped 8.0. Since this we have released 8.0.1, 8.0.2, 8.1, 8.5, 8.5.1, 9.0, 9.1, 9.5, 9.5.1, and we are about to release 10.0. And we expect another major release later this year. That's what we mean by about twice a year.

We'd hate to lose you as a customer. There's a lot of good stuff in 10.0. I hope you try it when it releases...soon. We've made a lot of process changes to ensure that the upgrade goes smoothly. And the release in the second half of the year will be just a feature-packed, if not more so.

If you'd like to talk about it more, please send me a private message, and we'll be happy to discuss at length.