Answered Has OE 11.5 been release today (8/12/2014)?

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

"In a contract"? Do you mean your annual maintenance?

 

[Cringer]

Sorry yes that's what I mean.

 

[tamhas]

What do you mean by in contract ... the maintenance agreement?

 

[tamhas]

But, why would that influence the pricing?

 

[Cringer]

I'm not in possession of the full details as my boss dealt with them, but basically it's to do with the way they reallocate what we currently have. It was going to cost us £40,000 or so to change structure. It should be cheaper when maintenance is up.

 

[tamhas]

That's bizarre. I have only ever had them credit the value of the old and apply to the price of the new. Now, perhaps they want the maintenance for 12 months starting now and you only have N months left on the current one, so you would have to pay the difference to get a full 12 months, but it isn't like you are losing any money that way since the new contract is ends farther in the future. In fact, if your current contract is more expensive than the new one, then you would actually save money the sooner you cashed it in.

 

[Cringer]

I've found the details. I was wrong. It was going to cost £55k.

We currently pay for REPL Plus. The license should have cost us £15 extra per user to transition. But apparently we have to pay the full cost of AEE RDBMS (£235 per user) over and above our current plan whilst we wait until our current product maintenance expires. Then we'd be transitioned over to the new maintenance plan with just AEE RDBMS at the correct price point. Then they increased the price on us as well making it nearly £400 per user extra whilst we wait for maintenance to lapse on our current product.

As I understand it we will be looking at this again when maintenance has lapsed, but in the meantime there's no point.

 

[Cringer]

I'm still a little hazy on the details, but it's a lot of cash extra for what should not be costing us much.

 

[tamhas]

This seems like yet another example of a confused and possibly greedy salesperson. Every deal I have seen is swap what you have based on what it cost and apply that to the new product. Very occasionally, it will be more generous, i.e., where they will give an equivalent license even though one had not paid that much, e.g., moving from class based pricing. But, dollar for dollar trade in is the worst case. The only impact of swapping during a maintenance contract should be applying a partial year of old dollars (pounds!) to a full year of new.

 

[Cringer]

I completely agree. Unfortunately this experience has put my boss off talking with the rep in question about it, meaning we're unlikely to get the product.
In truth it was a bonus for us rather than a necessity as REPL Plus is the only product we really use, but having the chance to set up OE Management with all the bells and whistles (particularly the implied rumours of what might be in 11.6/other future releases) as well as having the chance to look at table partitioning with almost no financial impact was a great prospect. As it is we will have to wait until at least maintenance is lapsed, maybe indefinitely.

 

[tamhas]

If one lets the rep get away with nonsense, there may never be a good time.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

In the meantime if you want to play with OEM or TP, get a one-year PSDN subscription. It's not that much. Failing that, get an eval license.