atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Software Licensing Fees and VOIP Systems

Well first of all... if it takes someone that long to do an upgrade, they are doing something wrong. If the dealer is installing a patch for a bug found, then I would say the dealer should have tested more, researched the known caveats, or chalked it up to the cost of doing business and not charged the customer.

If the customer is requesting an upgrade to a newer version for additional features, then that is more than fair to charge the customer.

I think that there's some confusion here regarding the difference between licenses and upgrades. When I refer to licenses, I'm regarding to "right to use" fees that must be paid for the right to use the system's operating software for a fixed term.

Upgrades, keys or codes are purchased on an as-needed basis for a one-time fee. The "codes" mentioned are simply upgrades, meaning that the features are there, but they just need to be unlocked (and paid for) in order to use them. That makes perfect sense and there's little chance that anyone would argue that point.

The bottom line is that there ARE many VOIP applications that require software subscriptions. One manufacturer even touts this as being a "guaranteed revenue producing tool" for their dealers.

I believe that we have reached the point of "thou dost protest too much". Licensing fees are real.

Licensing fee's are real, and are the biggest scam in the software industry. It's like a car manufacturer selling an extended warranty, they are considered free money.

Maybe sometime this weekend i'll sit down with some nice green tea and relax and formulate a nice ed-style 1000-word post to add to why it's such a scam and furthermore why it still exists.

Anyone remember Circuit City's DIVX experiment?

https://hometheater.about.com/library/weekly/aa062199.htm

Right to use has been in the Definity/Communication Manager world forever. It stinks!!! 1/2 of the cost of a new PBX is right to use. Thankfully the RTU costs are only a one time fee.

To make matters worse, with CM4.0 and greater Avaya is making you sign a 3 year maintenance assist contract.

you relize that even panasonic is moving in that direction if you want to add 16 sip trunks to the
tde in the virtual trunk card slot it will have a
activation fee

There is a difference between licensing to add features than licensing just to continue using the features you already bought......

ED, I hate it, but the senerio you explaned has happenes to us alot..

Its a no win situation you have to somehow convince the customer that the IT guy they hired and trust to handle this stuff, is wrong!!!

its actually refreshing when you have an IT guy that when you mention voip says "why would I want voice slowing down my network, I have enough to worry about"

As I mentioned in another post, at the company I work for software assurance/maintenance fees are not unexpected. We've paid them for our Microsoft software, our mainframe environment, and on other applications. I can't speak for a mom-and-pop type company, but for a mid-size company like us this is just considered a part of doing business. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that I don't see any of our upper management considering it as unusual for phone system licensing to work this way as well.

Just out of curiousity, other then the one-time Right to Use fee's for microsoft licensing (Server and CAL's), what maintenance fee's do you pay them?

I am not aware of any licensing scheme that microsoft has with recurring right to use, just one-time up-front licensing.

Software Assurance (SA) for all server and application software. That software assurance lasts 2-3 years depending on your licensing level. After that, renewal of software assurance is required in order to receive updated versions of the software. Same is true for our Citrix software, Lotus Domino, Antivirus, etc. Each vendor might call it something different, but it's all really the same.

Some items I'll purchase without the SA if I don't think that I'll be upgrading in the near future. I did that with our Microsoft Office software as we've been using Office 2000 for 5+ years. Now if I want to upgrade to Office 2007, I'll need to purchase all new licenses for that.

It's really just a numbers game. If, for example, the software assurance cost runs 33% of the cost of new licenses for a two-year term, then it makes sense if you plan to upgrade to a newer version within 4-5 years.

Of course, with some software you really are forced to keep paying the renewal fees. With our anti-spam software, for example, we may not get the updates to keep our inboxes largely spam-free without paying the renewal fees (annually in the case of that vendor). Of course we've blocked over 11 million spam messages in the last 2 years, so that cost is certainly justified.