Having set up their financial models for generating continuously smooth quarterly income through annual subscription (maintenance) payments by their customers, CAD vendors now live in fear of said customers delaying payments. After all, costs must to be cut during this recession.
Some, like Bentley Systems, use the hammer approach. Skip paying, and you owe the accountants in Exton all the missed years' worth of payments when you do renew. Sort of a pay-for-service-and-pay-for-no-service "benefit" to the customer.
PTC today announced a carrot approach, calling it the PTC Gold Loyalty Program. In return for affirming your liege to PTC, you get "special offers on products and services that help you get the most from PTC software:" 3dconnexion, Mentor Graphics, Virtalis, Z Corporation, Objet, and Adobe.
If they want actually wanted more to get on the maintainence/subscription bandwagon, all they have to do is stop using them as beta testers, or at least, offer a reward for documenting and reporting previously unknown bugs.
Using the customer base as unpaid QA/producting testing personel has never been a popular business practice.
Posted by: Tony Tanzillo | Dec 31, 2008 at 06:37 AM
In the past, PTC has also demanded back payment of prior missed subscription dues, particularly to move to the current version. (eg: 2000i up to Wildfire) Or after more than 3 misses, you could just buy a new seat.
It wouldn't be so annoying if the process went smoothly, but each of the past 3 years we have to fight off a late fee because... (the notice was sent to the wrong department and for the wrong product, the agent for our account was reassigned, our Pro/E seats got mixed with the MathCAD seats which were on a different schedule)
If they have to extort annual dues for support, the first thing to fix should be the payment process itself.
Posted by: John N | Jan 05, 2009 at 03:46 PM