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Maintenance Renewals Not Made Easy

Help - We get four different invoices for Solarwinds Maint. renewals -spread accross two different account numbers.

I've opened up tickets 3 times over the past two years to get the account numbers consolidated, but nothing happens.

And I'd really like a conterminous service agreement for all our wonderful stuff - that unfortunately stops working when the bill doesn't get paid.

Anyone at SW that can make this happen, or am I dreamin???????

A sign of success is making it easy for the customer to hand you cash, and in one big pile of it.

Don

BTW, the booth at Interop was Kick-Ass!!!!

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mark_wiggans

I can see about the consolidation of the accounts. For future reference there is now a direct email for maintenance renewals.

maintenance@solarwinds.com

FormerMember

I'd really like a conterminous service agreement

I'm with you Don! I would like to see one consolidated annual bill for all the SW products we have.

We have only one account but have every Orion component except NTA and more than a dozen Toolsets purchased over the years at various times, expiring every other month or so. The billing drives us nuts. The notifications are vague and unclear as to what product is expiring. Gotta go to the SW webpage to find out products name & expiration date (and lacks registration information like serial# & hostname). It would be nice to have the product, registration info (hostname & serial#) in the notifcations as well as on the invoices. The bean counters get screwed up and think they already paid the invoice, for example, 2 Toolsets when the invoice/notification is for the next 2 that are about to expire. Many times maintenance lapses before they resolve the matter. It's a pain in the a-- to me as the owner of the tools to have to continuously keep following up to make sure accounting is renewing the right maintenance agreements and they don't lapse. It would be great to only have one annual bill from SW. Whenever a new product is purchased, it would be great if SW would pro-rate the cost up to the next billing cycle so we only have to deal with one invoice for all SW products.

savell

I'm a second vote for better account management. After a lot of work from the accounts staff at Solarwinds I now have all our products co-termed to the same date.

However, at each renewal we still receive separate invoices (something like 17 or 18 now). This sparks an e-mail exchange to get a custom produced single invoice to pay.

I think that if an existing customer purchases another product, then they should be given the option to co-term it with the other licenses (which would allow a single yearly maint invoice) - rather than have to annoy the accounts staff.

Dave.

Edit: rgward beat me by 1 minute, but he said it better! (and must type faster than me)

dave.woolterton

I can only say I think it depends on how you buy your products. Our Supplier has just done that, both consolidation to one account and making everything expire at the same time. For us this happened about two years ago.

IT can be done

sedmo

I agree! I'm currently going through the exercise of trying to get the maintenance terms for all our products to expire on the same date. The ability to pro-rate maintenance for terms less than one year would be very helpful.

FormerMember

You can definitely co-terminate maintenance, but you must call us and ask for it. We can't do it without a request. For a variety of accounting reasons, we can only co-term for terms longer than 12 months.

We can also merge accounts, but you must call in and ask. We cannot, however, merge any older accounts from ipMonitor.

Network_Guru

I'd really like a conterminous service agreement

I'm with you Don! I would like to see one consolidated annual bill for all the SW products we have.
We have only one account but have every Orion component except NTA and more than a dozen Toolsets purchased over the years at various times, expiring every other month or so. The billing drives us nuts. The notifications are vague and unclear as to what product is expiring. Gotta go to the SW webpage to find out products name & expiration date (and lacks registration information like serial# & hostname). It would be nice to have the product, registration info (hostname & serial#) in the notifcations as well as on the invoices. The bean counters get screwed up and think they already paid the invoice, for example, 2 Toolsets when the invoice/notification is for the next 2 that are about to expire. Many times maintenance lapses before they resolve the matter. It's a pain in the a-- to me as the owner of the tools to have to continuously keep following up to make sure accounting is renewing the right maintenance agreements and they don't lapse. It would be great to only have one annual bill from SW. Whenever a new product is purchased, it would be great if SW would pro-rate the cost up to the next billing cycle so we only have to deal with one invoice for all SW products.

Ditto for us.

We have two products on the same account expiring within a week of each other, but trying to get them consolidated is difficult at best.
It makes sense to me that it would save time and money for both SW and our company to reduce the paperwork and processing required for multiple invoices and POs throughout the year ?!?

FormerMember

Guru,

When you say it's difficult, do you mean you've contacted Customer Service and they haven't been able to do it? I'll just repeat that we can't do this automatically because of the implications that would have for customers who do not want their maintenance co-terminated.

Denny

mschwarz

I recently co-termed several of my SW products for maintenance renewal. I must say the lady I spoke with understood exactly what I was asking for and made it happen in one phone call. Their policy is that they can co-term renewals that are close together with no problem and adjust all pricing to match then term date. If you have an item that has a renewal date that is far off (i don't remember if is 6 months or just one that expires in the next calendar year) then there is an internal department approval that has to be given. I had one that needed approval and they just made it happen.

Network_Guru

Guru,
When you say it's difficult, do you mean you've contacted Customer Service and they haven't been able to do it? I'll just repeat that we can't do this automatically because of the implications that would have for customers who do not want their maintenance co-terminated.
Denny

Our vendor management is now dealing with this, but I did suggest they combine the 2 invoices since they were only a week apart. I did not hear back from Customer Service or Accounts Payable regarding this suggestion.