Cancel your software maintenance contract?

Some unique advice from Janus Boye and a lively discussion. Janus says:

save some money in 2009: Cancel your maintenance and support (M&S) contracts with your CMS and enterprise portal vendors

I very much agree with his analysis and perspective on the value of these contracts. These contracts are nowhere near an insurance policy. I’ll also agree with his view on finding a local company that can assist you in your time of need. All that said Janus’ analysis is meaningful for organizations that have a solid support infrastructure. I have not found too many organizations that contain the type of support organization required to support these enterprise systems without an M&S contract. If you do not have a solid support organization then you may be stuck with M&S contracts because your support group doesn’t contain the necessary skills required to sustain these complex systems.

For those that do have a good and reliable support organization, over the years I’ve learned that some vendors have been known to prorate your M&S contract to get your licenses valid if you want that next major upgrade. So, if your M&S contract costs 100k per year and your contract has lapsed for 3 years and you want that next 10.1 upgrade, then vendor may charge you $300k to get your license valid. This is good because new licenses could cost $1M. However, I’d highly recommend that if you feel you support organization is solid enough to do without M&S contracts then you should look at the great open source portals and cms’s. Take a look at the Java CMS report and the CMS Watch’s open source portal report.

You know what to do! So do it!