To Renew Or Not To Renew…There Is No Question!
The current business model for enterprise level capture software suites is not simply to sell you a product and walk away, but rather it is to become a partner. The initial purchase is the beginning of that relationship. When you invest in a software suite such as Kofax Capture or ILINX Capture, you are modifying your business processes to accommodate the features and capabilities of the product to hopefully improve you productivity. Once these capture products become part of your work life you will want to keep up your maintenance/software Assurance/upgrade assurance, so as new versions are released, you take advantage of a new feature or simply to stay compatible with your current operating system. If it was worth investing in originally it is worth maintaining.
Some customers choose not to adopt the partner model and never buy maintenance beyond the first year. Then the day comes when the system goes down and they don’t even know where to start to fix the problem. And in order to get the current version, the manufacture requires them to pay for all the back maintenance plus a reinstatement fee. Sure the first reaction might be to start over fresh with another product, but once you look at changing your processes to accommodate a different product, you can quickly eliminate the savings you thought you were getting in the first place.
In terms of license volume reduction, it has been my experience that the customer is only saving hundreds of dollars today with the potential of spending thousands in the future. I think that it is a bold move by some manufacturers to enforce the “all or nothing” approach to license renewal but it is really in the best interest of the customer to keep current with all of their licenses. I think this was a driving force when this policy was constructed. I think it causes a lot of work for more than one person to keep track of licenses that customers may or may not be using when they are considering just a partial renewal. That is one of many reasons why end users are becoming more and more interested in ILINX Capture, to avoid the hassles of volume-based licensing. The pro’s to renewing software assurance are obvious and the expenditure is nominal; the cons are sometimes surprising and the expenditure is often alarming.
Whether using Kofax or ILINX Capture, staying current gives you the comfort of knowing that you are entitled to the necessary software to upgrade when the time comes. And partnering with ImageSource, Inc. lends the right expertise to get the job done right the first time!
Andrea Latham, CDIA+
Inside Sales
ImageSource, Inc.
