Over the next few weeks, I thought might share some of my annoyances with life in Corporate IT; some of them are vendor driven and some are the result of wrong-headed thinking in the end-users! I'm sure everyone has their own annoyances and some of my readers could probably write several volumes on theirs.
So first up is 'Enterprise License Agreements' or what they mean and how end-users tend to look at them; this is often a case of the end-user walking into a nicely vendor-dug trap and smiling as they fall into it.
For a single payment; you can consume as much of a vendor's product as you possibly can over a period of time; so what's not to like?
Well after the contracted period, you face a license true-up; so you've merrily gone on consuming as much as you can eat and now you have an elasticated waist-band on your servers and now you must pay for all those licenses.
Of course that payment will probably take the form of another 'Enterprise License Agreement' and so it goes on but you've got so many installs of the software; you have effectively become an addict and there's no way out.
Time after time; I hear project managers tell me 'But it's free and it doesn't cost my project anything!'. You try to explain that it's not free and there might be a better fit for their problem but it all falls on deaf-ears. After all, the project manager gets it for free and there's no annoying budgetary considerations for them to take on.
And then there is the situation where an inordinate amount is spent on an ELA and yet at the end of the period when you do the calculation, your cost per license is no better than if you'd gone for a PAYG-type model.
ELAs, one of the industry's great cons or at least, one of Bod's annoyances!
I think to be fair, you need to point out the plus side. Every ELA I’ve ever seen has resulted in EXTREMELY discounted software costs. So yes, you may end up consuming 10x what you normally would, but at the end of the day it’s STILL cheaper than what you would’ve paid if you were buying individual licenses. If you’re big enough, I don’t really see a downside. During the true-up phase, most organizations I’ve worked with will clean-house and decommission systems that aren’t being used.
And that decommissioning comes for free? IBM, in mainframe days, used to(and may still do) allow mainframe customers to install whatever they liked and then at the end of the year, IBM would audit and then pretty much charge whatever they liked. The customer was locked in and could not decommission.
ELA’s do have their use but the way many end-user customers use them actually means that they are extremely dangerous.
I have mixed feelings about you comments.
I can understand that the free for all mentality increases lock in, but if the cost breaks even at the end of the day you have to think about the savings in administration overhead.
I was involved in an evaluation committee several years ago when something similar came up. One of the vendors offered to include that normally needed a separate order as part of the anual maintenance cost. This didn’t cost the vendor anything, they made the same revenue either way, but it would save my employer a lot of time wasted in processing each order and back billing each department.
Just because it doesn’t save you anything off the invoice, doesn’t mean it doesn’t save you somewhere else.
Of couse, this still leaves you very valid lock in point.