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Forum Guru
 
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 12/20/2008 9:09:35 PM
Posts: 51, Visits: 82 |
| Pat Loring (10/24/2008)
Rick DeLuco (10/15/2008)
I welcome the call ... I currently have an Unlimited node license. Got a phone call yesterday that turned south very quickly once I was informed my annual maintenance was coming due and that my costs were just south of 2K. Then this person said ( and this is what lit me off like a roman candle ) our (IPSWITCH)licensing structure changed and this cost will only reflect 1-500 node.
Net - Net -- My unlimited is now limited and my cost just went through the roof ... Humm ..... why am I tweaked?Update: After this post, I spoke with Rick about his service agreement renewal options and we determined that the 2500 device license that he owned was much larger than what was needed for his environment. We offered to lower his license device count by adjusting it to match his environment. The result was an environment appropriate license and a significant reduction in annual spend for Rick's company, close to half of what he paid last year for an Unlimited license Service Agreement. I'd like to try to explain what happened in Rick's case. Way back when Rick purchased WhatsUp, Ipswitch had very few options for environments larger than 250 Devices. Since then we have added several other tiers. With the release of v12 customers who owned the Unlimited Licenses were auto migrated to our largest published tier - the 2500 device license. This may not have been the best choice for everyone, but we wanted to offer people the largest published license. We did send notices to everyone letting them know that they have options to downgrade when their agreement is up for renewal. Rick said he never received this notice, so I apologized to him for that. Other customers may find that their environment fits within our lower tiers which are now available today. If you are concerned about the price of maintenance I do encourage everyone to check the number of licenses you are truly monitoring with WhatsUp Gold. You can find this in your Home Workspace Report. You may find that you are like Rick and you don't need the level of license that you have been migrated to. Ipswitch is very flexible about allowing people to downgrade their license. You are welcome to contact our Service Sales team @ 781.676.5700 to discuss your options. We certainly appreciate the feedback that Rick provided. It helped us to realize an error on our part and we were able to lower his costs while still delivering a solution that fits his environment. Thanks for reading... Pat Loring Director of Sales Network Management Division Ipswitch, Inc. Pat, that's great for him, but we monitor over 1300 devices with our system, and the potential for going higher is there, so the 2500 Object licenses is what we need in my opinion. Which brings us back to the original issue. Maintenance costs are escalating, and I don't use support maintenance as much as a lot of newbies to the game (sorry for the name folks, but that's just the nature of the beast). When I first purchased WUG for our organization, it was back in the days of WUGv7/8, and for the $1K initial start up cost and an annual maint agreement back then of $300, we were set, but with the release of WUP, which was a failure in it's own right, keeping us from upgrading (I won't get in to the specifics, but needless to say, we still had to pay the increased maintenance costs to maintain our older software installed system!), the maintenance costs doubled, and now that WUGv11/v12 have been released, they are fast approaching what HP Open View was charging, which is what we were trying to get away from int he first place (paying $2.5K annual maintenance costs for software we weren't able to get properly configured, or keep running!). Anyway to make a long story short, I too feel IPSwitch has gotten greedy, especially since those of us who have been loyal customers since it's earlier days, and have contributed ideas without cost... IPSwitch really should rethink it's maintenance costs... I'm not sure how much longer we can keep WUG, since they just spent a fair chunk of change to purchase BAC from Mercury and it does a heck of a lot more than IPSwitch will ever do, and all within a framework product (granted, not easy to install/configure, but the monitoring team is getting there fairly quickly)... IPSwitch's main draw for us was it's low cost, but that's gotten way out of hand now...
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Bryan Harrell
Network Infrastructure - Tallahassee
Fla. Dept of Revenue
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Forum Member
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 12/4/2008 3:00:08 PM
Posts: 27, Visits: 21 |
| I won't go too deep into it - I love what WUG can do and the ease of which I can do it - but my thought is, for the most part I only use "maintenance" (by calling tech support), when I can't get a feature to work after fiddling, knowledge base (which has improved), and forums don't help me out. It's not often.
If you want to keep increasing the price of ANNUAL maintenance (which really is pushing us further away from renewing every year) at least keep your hold/ wait times under 10 minutes and/ or add features that are not add-ins with additional costs. What'sUp v12.3 does 90% of what What'sUP 7 did (only major improvements to DB (MSDE, and DB (SQL2005) both costless to Ipswitch) and I miss the old reports - particularly pie chart disk usage and being able to read an entire SNMP trap without having to expand the details column a billion times or export to a report.
In general we are paying much more for the same product whose existing features end up less useful and more features that provide little value to all users. Focus development and support or lose customers to a pricing scheme that really is pushing this fantastic product out of the reach of the people that helped it get where it is!
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Member of the WhatsUp Gold team
Group: Administrators
Last Login: Today @ 1:38:36 PM
Posts: 306, Visits: 335 |
| Navigato,
Thanks for your honest feedback. I'm passing your message on to our product management team.
The good news is that we're working to correct both of the issues you raised about tech support wait times and the need to continuously introduce additional features and value into our core product.
Keep an eye out v12.4, which should be available in the first quarter of 2009. It addresses several outstanding issues that have been reported by customers and introduces some new features that we're really excited about.
Also, if you have specific ideas for enhancements you'd like to see, either add them to the Poll thread that Sergio started (it's pinned at the top of this forum) or send me a PM or e-mail and I'll make sure they filter into our product management process for consideration.
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Will Sansbury
Member of the WhatsUp Gold team
Twitter: willsansbury
 If you need help with anything, let me know!
Send me a private message or an email. I'll be glad to help. |
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| | | Forum Member
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 12/17/2008 2:42:26 PM
Posts: 49, Visits: 127 |
| | another issue that i have with support (this isn't necessarily related to WUG (but it could be depending on how my luck runs), but primarily with Imail), is that there is NO after hours support! the last time when we had our mailserver decide that it didn't want to do anything and just crashed (at 2AM mind you), and we were unable to get it back up, we were unable to contact support to get any help! we ended up having to build a new box and migrate the data over to get the system up and running again! we have 40 domains with over 1000 email accounts, so you can imagine the frustration... |
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Group: Administrators
Last Login: 12/30/2008 9:40:52 PM
Posts: 27, Visits: 393 |
| Hi Bryan,
Thanks for your message. Yes, I agree you are a larger environment and you need the larger sized WhatsUp Gold License. Like many vendors, and life in general, our costs have gone up over the years, which has necessitated that our prices increase as well.
As you noted WhatsUp Gold maintenance costs, back when you purchased in 1999 or so, were 30% of your new license acquisition cost (which at $1000 was incredibly affordable). Maintenance still remains that same % of a new license purchase today, it's just that a new license costs more in today's market. We've recently spent a lot of time looking at the market and trying to make sure that we continue to deliver the best total cost of ownership. Our studies show that even with our price increases we are still between 5 and 8 times cheaper than our competitors for a new acquisition cost, and that translates to much less in maintenance. 30% of $8K (WUG) is a lot less than 20% of $50K (WUG Competition).
Regarding Mercury, I haven't looked at them, but I can assure you WhatsUp Gold v12 is now by definition a framework and it has several plug-in packages available now for your evaluation: VOIP Monitor, NetFlow Monitor and WhatsConnected are all plug-ins that are selling extremely well since their introduction and they are all available to customers who use WhatsUp v12 Standard or Premium. We'll take a look at BAC from Mercury to see if we can add some of their capabilities to WhatsUp Gold. Hopefully we can make it a lot easier for you there too.
I wish we could all still pay 1999 prices. Cars were cheaper, milk was cheaper, everything was cheaper...I hope that helps to explain some things. Email me directly if you'd like to talk in person. I'd be happy to speak with you.
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Pat Loring
Network Management Team
Ipswitch, Inc. |
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