Are there any SSA customers who have gone through the experience of finding you were "over" licensed for a product and wanted to reduce the number of licenses you pay support and maintenance for?

If you have gone through this experience, I'm interested in hearing how it went.

Thanks.

I am aware of a company that has reduced its support licence count from several hundred to fraction of that because it has moved most functions to SAP and will complete the migration within the next year.

This company was originally a division of our company until sold several years back and the reduction began when the company was still Baan and not SSA-GT.

SSA are not likely to like a reduction of this very lucrative income stream but I think the most they can do is threaten an all-or-nothing situation. A point that needs to be kept in mind is that the annual fees are for support and software upgrade and are not for a licence to use the product. The initial licence purchase is for a perpetual use licence.

The upgrade entitlement is something to consider. However, the fact that something like 3 quarters of the Baan users are on BaanIV or earlier versions that have now been installed for 6 to 10 years and have not taken up the newer versions probably means that the cost of and upgrade project (pay SSA very high rates for data migration, project management etc) does not offset any added functionallity. Alternatively many companies have or intend to upgrade to products like SAP, Peolesoft (and JDE).

Terry

I know a lot of companies that reduced workforce so they reduced license.

Your account manager might try to cut a deal with you but it's a fairly simple process - run Requested System Config, send to SSA, they'll give you the new license key with reduced users and vollia all done.

Don't know of a single hassle in the companies that I've worked with.

Dave

I know a lot of companies that reduced workforce so they reduced license...

Dave

They own the licences in perpetuity. It is reduction in number of licences for which support is paid that is intended.

The issue that I see is what would be the situation at sometime in the future if a software upgrade were desired (LN etc). The licence count for that new version may be limited to the number of support seats paid for.

I guess that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.. but it's early in the day..

For example, I have 80 users, i pay support for 80 users. I have unlimited upgrade potential..

If i want to upgrade my 80 users to ERP LN (or whatever) no sweat, i email ssa, they send the software i send them the new SLM xml file and i'm at 80 users on ERP LN.

If i reduce my # of licenses to 50, I pay support for 50, i have 50 users.. If later i want to upgrade to ERP LN, i do the same thing..

If I decide that I need more users, I license my system for more and pay support for more..


Now - if I'm not paying support then yes that's complicated - since you can't get software or a new license w/o a support contract (as far as I can tell)

But if that's the case - then the question doesn't make sense - if you aren't paying for support - then why would you need / want to reduce your # of licenses?

Dave

...Now - if I'm not paying support then yes that's complicated - since you can't get software or a new license w/o a support contract (as far as I can tell)...But if that's the case - then the question doesn't make sense - if you aren't paying for support - then why would you need / want to reduce your # of licenses?...
Dave

What I see is at this point where we are paying support for 50 but have legal licenced for 80 for the software. We may be entitled to upgrade at the 50 level but there could be a problem now saying to SSA we want to again pay for 80 user support and will use the upgrade that we got at 50 for the 80 users.

If this were not a problem then companies could just go for the lower support number and temporarily increase to benefit from upgrade then drop back to a lower level. I think this would depend on SSA's willingness to negotiate and true state of the company's operations. ie: if it is clear that the company was not trying to rip-off SSA.

Terry