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Does Your Vendor Issue Gag Orders?
Presto Vivace writes to tell us that CIO has an interesting article about customer "gag orders" that some ERP vendors are trying to impose contractually. "The effect: customers will be prevented from working with peers and others in the software company's "ecosystem" to help with technical issues or compare pricing options. 'In addition,' Wang adds, 'the customer now lacks the proper checks and balances in pressuring a vendor to deliver on promised capabilities or address severe security issues, and cannot go to the media as a last resort, if needed.'" What other questionable practices (and potential solutions) have others had to work with?
Since ERP is critical to many organizations, all we need now is a homeland security tie-in and anyone who complains about how shitty their ERP package is gets hauled off for interrogation.
Don't laugh, I'm only about 3% joking about this.
Let them sue you and let them watch gag orders get thrown out as unconscionable.
Right?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Why would any major company agree to such arrangements?
Of course such insane arrangements with respect to investments lead to a portion of the financial meltdown.
Think Deeply.
I just got an email from my boss that our proposal to switch to a new reporting tool, mostly due to the licensing BS the old company tried to pull, has been approved. The moral? Don't pull this shit or you'll get dumped. Rewriting all of our reports in the new environment is going to be expensive, but cheaper, in the long run, than dealing with that sleazy company.
"and cannot go to the media as a last resort, if needed.'"
Is that a joke? What an interesting story that would be.
Whale
"Presto Vivace writes to tell us that CIO has an interesting article about customer "gag orders" that some ERP vendors are trying to impose contractually. "
Contracts aren't blank checks. There are limits.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
And they wonder why people resort to piracy?
In all seriousness, trying to force the consumer to do anything to save your business will ultimately drive them away. If you want to safeguard your business, stop making a poor product, work with your customers to fix issues, give decent support, and stop trying to legally tie their hands behind their backs.
This is akin to legal DRM. All it does to legitimate customers is push them away; software piracy seems like the only recourse. Companies have to learn that this is the kind of stuff that we won't stand for if it is ever to change.
-SaNo
My ERP vendor takes an entirely different strategy of providing miserable tech support, denying the existence of obvious bugs, claiming the the 1960s technology on the back end is better than modern day RDMS, and having their tech support staff focus on minute tiny details that aren't relevant to the problem whenever you ask them for a solution.
I'd switch ERPs in a heartbeat, if the economy would recover.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
my ass is on fire you dick face
Call customer support for assistance. Depending on your level of support, we may have a technician on site to deal with your ass fire in as little as 24 hours.
Please do not attempt to solicit help extinguishing your ass from any other source, as this would violate your terms of service. Also, you are reminded that comparing notes with other customers regarding the cost, support level, or any other aspect of your ass extinguishing service will likewise be in violation of the terms of your contract.
Thank you for choosing Enterprise Ass Extinguishing Services for all your ass fire extinguishing needs. A sales representative will contact you following the successful extinguishing of your ass fire for your feedback.
:rofl:
Seriously, anyone who's living under a gag order like that and can't go to the "media" won't be able to talk about it on Slashdot, either. It's right there in the first concern listed in TFA:
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
A sales representative will contact you following the successful extinguishing of your ass fire for your feedback.
And we'll also send you a coupon for 50% OFF on fire extinguishing the next time your buttocks are on fire.
Face your daemons!
Not sure how it works in the USA be here in Australia any legal contract that misrepresents consumer rights as stated in legislated consumer law can leave a company open to a AU$10,000 fine for each infringement found. A few years back I remember a case were someone got hurt by flying debris on a race track and the owner denied responsibility because on the back of the ticket it said the patrons had no rights to claim damages. Well it went to court the track owner not only had to pay the medical bills and damages but was dragged back into court for fraud and misrepresenting consumer law.
The software and services fees for an ERP installation often run into the millions on dollars.
And support contracts come up for renegotiation occasionally.
Can't the customer just cross out the relevant lines in the proposed contract and say, "fuck you"? And if they can't, because the vendor has so much control over the relationship, *that* along should be a cause of nightsweats for the CIO, CEO, and the board of directors.
Epic win
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I get the impression a lot of people who say that restrictions on what you can say about your service is immoral, even if it isn't illegal, haven't experienced what it's like to be at a very small IT company.
Customers will mess you around big time. They'll get you to spend a lot of time preparing an assessment and quote, get you to travel halfway around the country to have a 45 minute meeting with you which is fair enough. However they'll then take your proposal, show it to another company who spend some time figuring out how they'd provide a similar service and travel up for a meeting. The customer would then say "can you do this £500 cheaper?". If they say yes they go back to the first company to see if they'll go lower.
You can argue this is just being sensible but in truth, you're using up a lot of other people's time and eventually they'll have next to no profit margin but can't give up the contract because so much time has been invested already. Whilst this is going on, the company has to take the focus away from looking for new contracts to work with them.
This can utterly destroy small businesses who need a steady stream of income to keep their head above water. I work for a company who suffers from this but thankfully it's comprised of a lot of small companies in similar situations and they'll warn each other if there's a customer wasting time like this. Not every company is IBM, Microsoft etc. who can absorb the cost of these customers. We were almost driven to administration by one particular religious group who, after stringing us along for a month and having us draw up a complex proposal and organise government assistance for them, decided to show our proposal to a different company and get them to undercut us.
Many companies have no choice but to force NDAs on lots of aspects of proposals because of this.
Well, it IS a bit unusual for a company with which you have a vendor relationship to send YOU an order, but if your company makes the best in a variety of gags and other imprisonment equipment and they have a specific use for them, then there could be perfectly reasonable explanations as to why they might want to...
What?
That's not it?
Oh.
Doesn't matter. In fact, makes more sense, really, there's not much business in the gag industry. Might raise some eyebrows, especially with a company acting as a vendor to others. However, everybody needs a good laugh now and then, and if your company makes some decent gags and other tomfoolery to go around, then I can certainly...
What NOW?
It isn't?
Are you serious?
Well, that IS a bit shameful, then. I mean, your company's time and effort is very important, and it can't be stuck wasting both dealing with phony "gag" orders. In fact, there should be laws against it, though I get the feeling these are a bunch of punk kids trying to...
Look, if you're going to keep interrupting me...
What do you MEAN "wrong again"?!?
*sigh* All right, fine, YOU make your own damn comments, all right?
Honestly, can't figure out just what it is you people want from me...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Because a Pointy Haired Boss says "I don't care what the end user license agreement says! Install the software!." After five or ten rounds of that, the admin doesn't even ask his/her manager anymore. They just click "I Agree" in the box without asking.
Now if it's an actual paper contract that goes through a legal department, the story might be different; but it rarely is.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Of course, if you're locked into their software already and these are the new terms for the next version which you have to have because they are dropping support for your present one, well, you were a complete loon to lock yourself in to begin with.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Where I am, vendors dance to our tune. Maybe it's because we're huge, but compared to the US we're tiny, but none of our vendors try that crap on us.
Jut the mere hint that we might think about going to a competitor, and they're scrabbling around on all fours, asking for forgiveness.
Don't agree to it in your contract and they have nothing on you? *shrug*
Isn't this exactly what happened with the iPhone SDK?
This stuff has been going on for many years. In the mid-90's PeopleSoft had most if not all of the same clauses in their contracts. Highly configurable software and users were not allowed, under the contracts, to share configurations, add-on code, homegrown reports, etc. Any violations of any of the clauses, by contract, would result in termination of support, termination of license for use, and/or lawsuits.
How about option three? Don't use their product at all?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Oh yes, and I laugh every time.
Of Code And Men
So, your expecting "as on fire" to get gagged while giving oral feedback to the sales representive?
I'm tired of reading the self-pitying whining of IT customers here. This is just the age old contest between buyers and sellers. If you don't like a particular contractual condition or price negotiate a better deal or take your business elsewhere. Its as simple as that.
I guess anything that needs to get out will have to be anonymously leaked.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Our ERP company is a crock of q14=&$^8 NO CARRIER
AT&ROFLMAO
Oh you've dealt with Information Builders, too?
In large enterprises, the "click through license" usually means nothing. Lawyers have gotten together to determine the true agreement.
But, some of those signed agreements are really, really stupid - sorta like the finance guy who would search ebay for better pricing on Cisco $150k switches. Idiot.
The PHB is usually a huge idiot when it comes to software. He/she got where they were by demanding action "install CRM this year", then holding all pay raises for 10,000 people in IT hostage until it is done.
Where I worked, Microsoft gave us a bunch of BPM free software. It turns out they needed some sucker/company to stress test it. What a joke. There software performance was tied to how big/fast your MS-SQL server clusters were since **every** transaction, no matter how short lived, had to be put into the DB. In the end, it couldn't keep up and we wasted 9 months with MS engineering/support. We deployed a few IBM P-series servers with 24 CPUs and switched to a UNIX BPM solution that could scale the way we needed in just a few months. Done.
The 120 windows servers were never fully reused before their warranties ran out. MS hadn't certified anything on VMs at the time.
I'm probably violating an agreement talking about this now. That was under company that was bought out by an even larger company a few years ago.
Its common in the utility business. Regulated utilities have little incentive to compete for customers in different service territories. So there's a natural tendency to share best practices, lessons learned, which products are crap and which are not among your peers. Because of this, vendors have maintained tight controls over contract terms involving NDAs as well as industry trade groups, where the customers might have a chance to make comparisons.
One interesting aspect of the utility business is that, while better tools and processes might save you some money, they rarely lead you to acquire larger shares of a market. Your market is defined by your assigned territory. The cost of poor software or operating practices is a very small part of your product's price, so your customers don't get a good signal about your efficiencies and modify their consumption accordingly. Because of this, if your vendors can keep you from looking at your neighbor's operations, or competitor's products, you can be kept in the dark, working with crap for a long time, none the wiser. Utility IT departments also tend to be refuges for (what's a nice way to say this?) the lower grades of the profession. Since its not a core competency of the business and metrics are difficult to accumulate across the industry, the poor performers rarely get exposed. And they have a lot to do with selecting the products.
Have gnu, will travel.
Nobody's forcing you to read this "whining".. I, as an IT professional WANT to know when a company is trying to pull these stunts.. If you don't like reading these articles, DON'T READ THEM!! I for one want to hear all I can about this type of activity by vendors.... STFU!!
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
*struggles against the duct tape*
URMMMM! HRMMMMM! NNNNNNNG!
*rocks chair*
Well I work for and we ! Frankly, otherwise. Furthermore , and I really don't see the problem.
Face it folks, we've entered dark waters. Being a consumer today has become a dangerous and wholly nasty affair. As a society we've become sheep, and allowed our service providers to hold us hostage and hijack our infrastructure to ensure that their imposed dominion receives little or no resistance. Worse we've raised a couple generations of fat stupid people who will gladly give up their rights as long as you give them a Whopper(tm) and American Idol at the properly programmed times periods. This is no subtle form of insanity.
"For Profit Prisons", last year spent $15,000,000,000 a year to ramrod state legislation through, criminalizing everything from publicly passing gas to not using the regulation leash for your lhasa apso (yes that was sarcasm, however as a real example, recently a 17 year old Florida girl, an honor student with scholarships in hand and the brightest of futures, receive a mandatory 13 year prison sentence for the crime of driving her boyfriends mother to a house, which unbeknownst to her just happened to be the place the woman bought her crack.) Those very same "For Profit Prison" turn around and contract prison labor for 50 cents and hour. It's in their interest that it becomes very easy for you to go to prison, and that your stay is a very, very long one. You may want to consider that smell, that aroma of smoldering ham, is your hinny in a very hot place.
We're on the verge of turning 50-100 million people into refugees in this country. Lost jobs, lost homes, lost personal assets and resources, and private companies are building the debtors prisons to house them as we speak. We've allowed things (though ignorance or indifference) to get completely out of hand, particularly over the last 10 years. It is time to put things right, and it begins by telling corporations... you don't get to take away my rights. You don't get to invest in my suffering. You don't get to profit from my heartbreak. Most of all, you don't get plunder my existence or the existence of my posterity. It's time we took our lives back from the small minded, the shrivel hearted, and those among us who seem to have a congenital lack of compassion or conscience. We are responsible for the lives we lead. If ERP companies want to strangle their customers, then someone needs to stand up, and say, I'm building an ERP company that serves, where making good money is important, but second to making satisfies customers, and then lives up to that promise. It might be easier to design businesses that run as little fascist kingdoms, but it's not desirable, and it should be made very expensive for the CEOs and their accountants and lawyers. It should be made so expensive nobody even considers the option.
my ass is on fire you dick face
Call customer support for assistance. [..] Please do not attempt to solicit help extinguishing your ass from any other source, as this would violate your terms of service.
This stuff has been going on for many years. In the mid-90's PeopleSoft had most if not all of the same clauses in their contracts.
OMFG!!! PeopleSoft were in the ass-on-fire business? No wonder they didn't want people discussing it!
:-P )
(Oh yeah, and... naughty boy. That's what you get for posting your comment as a "reply" to an unrelated one in order to get a more favourable position
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
VMware EULA, which expressly forbids the publishing of comparative benchmarking information about their software vs other virtualization products, stinks. Its 2009 and we are still having these kinds of problems with vendors, thought I was back in 1970 again talking to IBM for a moment...
Theres another take on this over at the 360 blog here.
That blog makes the point that it is impossible to do proper modeling, performance mgmt, or capacity planning, without such information in the public domain.
AG
Just to clarify, are we talking about Effective radiated power, the European Radio Project, the Economic Report of the President, Effective rate of protection, Enterprise resource planning, Ethernet Ring Protection, Effective refractory period, Event-related potential, Evoked (response) potential, Electronic Road Pricing, the Estonian Reform Party, the European Recovery Program, el Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, Exposure and response prevention, or Erotic Role-playing?
If we're talking about gag order, this must be Erotic Role-playing.
...is don't talk about ERP.
Most companies will skirt the law if they can improve/protect their bottom line. I remember "stories" of a large OEM that manufactured PCs who had a super fast bus technology they had patented. A certain large OEM that produced CPUs requested the specs so they could make sure their CPUs were optimized for the new bus. months later the PC OEM discovered motherboards with their bus being sold by CPU OEM in the Asian market. PC OEM threatened to sue. CPU OEM said that if they sued then they could no longer sell their CPUs to them directly and they would have to get them from a reseller agent. PC OEM licensed bus to CPU OEM.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I vaguely remember about 10 years ago one of the anti-virus vendors included in their EULA that you can't say anything bad about their software without getting their approval first? I remember immediately dumping them for all software evaluations for any product.
About 3 years ago I moved out of the software evaluation business, so I don't remember which one any more.
Similarly, a long distance company tried to forcibly move me to their Long Distance service. Even going so far as to saying I had approved in on the phone (they couldn't produce the recording when I demanded it).
Guess who didn't get to bid to be our ISP.
The bean counters don't see these numbers, but they cost these companies real dollars.
Ok, I give up, why you?
Since it wasn't specifically pointed out...and the original vendor has been bought out TWICE....
The thing i hate about this setup is the lack of user help. The only avenue for aid is through a paid support contract. Irrelevent for us as there is also a required yearly license or it shuts itself off (one of them undisclosed at purchase, i wouldn't have bought if both costs known :/) Sometimes it would be nice if people that found a workaround could share it, but since you can't talk about the problem it is tough to share the solution to something that doesn't exist.
There is also nothing to base a purchase decision on :( If more info had been available beforehand we might not have overlooked a MAJOR shortcoming during demo.
I expected a little more polish on a program that has been in use like 20 years....
Print a mini-contract on the back of the check used to pay the bills with said company.
Essentially state that by cashing this check, the payee agrees to release the payer from any and all contractual gag-orders or other stipulations that would limit the payers ability to counter problems that payee's product / service / support may give.
Then when an issue arises, wave the cashed check as the contract. It's as legal as the hodge podge the vendor tries to shove down the customers throat.
Better yet, photocopy the contract, and release it to the public (before signing it).
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
CLM may mean:
Cthulhu Love Manouever ...or permutations thereof.
Crazed Licentious Muppet
Coccyx Liberating Moose
Custom Lined Meerschaum
Coconut Lapidary Mount
Carnivorous Lemur Molester
Chilton's Lada Manual
Cretaceous Labradorite Mineralology
Chicken Lusting Madmen
Customer Lip Management
Cheeky Little Morons
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
So, basically, you need to pull such BS because you don't like the free market?
Because that's really how it was supposed to work: many perfectly interchangeable products and vendors, perfectly informed customers, and they'll buy from whoever asks the least money for it.
Yes, it drives profit margins down, but that's what it's supposed to do. And it's also the way to weed out the inefficient vendors. If company X can offer the exact same product for $500 less and still make a profit, while company Y would go bankrupt with it, then probably company X is a better use of society's resources.
It's really an optimization algorithm. It matches the available resources (employees, land, ore, electricity, whatever) to who/what can produce more of what everyone needs and less of what we don't.
Seems to me like at least the kind discussed here, wants to get rid of the shopping around _and_ the part about the customers being informed. You know, what with the gag orders and all.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you have some sacred right to make a profit. If your business model doesn't work without turning the whole market model on its head, well, maybe you shouldn't be in that business in the first place. Not said as a flame or anything, but I simply fail to see the point in returning to a fancy form of feudalism.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you must bend over for a customer that's trying to push you to sell below your costs. If you can't make a profit selling to them, fine, don't. That's also part of how the model is supposed to work. But basically "we have to act like a crappy monopolist because we can't compete on price" just fails to impress me.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Fine Print: The 50% off coupon is for one buttock only. There's an extra charge of both buttocks are on fire at once.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
There are several really high quality open-source ERP systems that have been getting some real traction in the press lately. OpenERP (http://openerp.com) and some of its derivatives come to mind. ERP vendors rake in $Billions. Their technology is old and clunky and their customers are almost universally unhappy. Until now, their customers have been captives to proprietary licenses, FUD, tradition, and even some bribery. Now, with the economy in free-fall, no one can afford to waste money on this ridiculously over-priced trash software. With open-source becoming the "cool buzz-word" and with more open-source friendly IT talent out there, I think we might see more companies take advantage of slow-times to restructure based on open-source software. ERP vendors know that they will eventually face this battle. I see these gag orders by the vendors are a preemptive move in this war. They want to be able to be able to spread FUD about open-source, but they first need to suppress the REAL disaster stories that involve their own software ;-)
I presume career limiting move, but please don't do this to readers... making them look up CLM when all you need to do is write a few more characters to make your meaning clear?
Using an abbreviation without expanding it carries a specific connotation, namely that the concept that the abbreviation represents is so entrenched that anybody who cares about the subject should already know the expansion. For example, entities who favor the expansion of government-granted monopolies on reproduction use "IP" without explaining that it refers to "intellectual property", not Internet Protocol.
I'm not about to try to explain an opensource ERP system to our S-Ox auditors. If we were a private company, I would be interested, but not for a public company. The ERP vendors know it, the consulting companies know it, and they are both going to make us pay for it.
Title says it all. This style of software business is in the blood of SAPers.
It's not just a "contest" to the vendors, it's all-out war on their customers.
Maybe it's time to show companies who declare war on their customers that it can go both ways.
That reminds me, in an unrelated, yet very related way, that The Pirate Bay is starting their court case. Bless those TPB guys for doing God's work.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I see that there is nothing wrong with trying to get a better deal.
In western culture, we have become used to accepting the price tag as is. Now that we've become exposed to other cultures that question the price tag, we've woken up and realised that everything is (and should be) negotiable. If companies (small or large) have a problem with that, then that is their problem. In the same way that the RIAA need to update their business models, so do these companies.
Western countries have become stupidly expensive to live in because companies/individuals have been charging whatever they want and the community has been taking it at face value. Now that we are questioning, they are trying to get us to stop.
.
And to think I almost went with Sado-m Ass Services!
Dubya is out of office, and Obama don't roll like that.
Obama voted to give telecoms immunity. Perhaps you didn't get the memo.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What other questionable practices (and potential solutions) have others had to work with?
As the customer, the solution is very simple:
"If you want me to sign the contract you need to remove these terms..."
As a consultant, we get that sometimes; and then we have to decide if we want the work or not.
A contract negotiation is just that, a negotiation.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Know who has the worst contracts out there? The American voting triopoly: Premier, ES&S, and Sequoia. I wouldn't be surprised if their lawyers tried subpoenaing Slashdot for my IP address just for posting this.
I once worked for the state, certifying these pieces of crap for use in the state. I managed to royally piss people off by mentioning, in politically correct terms, that the systems were crap.
Supposedly using debit instead of credit at the checkout doesn't cost the store anything. Is that true?
Debit cards still have charges. I am a member of two coops and they recommend that if you use a card for payments then to use a debit card for purchases below $20 and a credit card for purchases over $20. Below $20 the fees are lower with debit cards and credit cards are cheaper over $20.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
no problem sir, set a controlled back fire in your pubes to stop the spread of the main ass fire. We're now closing this case, if any further issues please call and we'll open another case file.
As much as I'd like it to be open source doesn't always do what's desired. Because I shouldn't spend the money Photoshop costs for a photography business I'll try to use CinePaint and see if it works for me. I've got a Mac and I already tried to install the Mac version of CinePaint, but it uses X11 and I haven't been able to get it to work. So Ive been thinking about setting up my Mac to dualboot Ubuntu, if so then I'll try CinePaint again. If it still doesn't work for me then I may end up having to buy Photoshop.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Did anyone else
who actually RTFA
feel that the
blog used an un-
necessarily re-
strictive charac-
ter per line limit?
Maybe normally
their stories are written as
haiku paragraphs
I know what you did last summer. Just kidding, I don't work at the NSA.
Worse we've raised a couple generations of fat stupid people who will gladly give up their rights as long as you give them a Whopper(tm) and American Idol at the properly programmed times periods.
It's not just Americans. In Hong Kong a passenger who is late to catch a flight "throws epic tantrum at Hong Kong airport"
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Similarly, a long distance company tried to forcibly move me to their Long Distance service. Even going so far as to saying I had approved in on the phone (they couldn't produce the recording when I demanded it).
That's called slamming and the FCC takes a dim view of it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
It seems that the gag order works. Those complaining are not mentioning whose ERM companies they are talking about. I guess it seems to work even before signing the agreement!
Tsk, tsk
I have a simple rule. I don't sign NDA's or confidentiality agreements. It means that I sometimes have to turn my back on a potential client but who cares, there are plenty more where they came from.
OK, enough snarkiness...
I agree with the poster who mentioned that any CIO that signs a contract that contained such terms ought to be fired. What the heck is IT coming to when vendors feels they need to clamp down on their customers this way? I know a lot of folks criticized it way back when it was published but I'm thinking that The Cluetrain Manifesto needs a new printing. With a copy sent to each member of the BoD of any company pulling this garbage.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It's really hard to fathom how stupid Adobe is. Is trivial to get a hacked copy. It's not trivial to do simple things like cross platform upgrades.
Yea, I agree. Even with GIMP and CinePaint I think Adobe could sell more Photoshop and the rest of their graphics software if they released versions of Linux. And if they lowered their prices. I don't know about switching platforms though, how hard it is that is.
It's not trivial to deal with activation / licensing on XP
Activation, and spyware like WGA, is one of the reasons I switched from Windows to Linux and OS X.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
About 3 or 4 weeks ago, there was a news story that broke on CBC about a law firm's voicemail system that got hacked, and they got stuck with a phone bill for $250,000 CAD. The firm said the phone company had at first offered to eat the costs (they have to pay their upstream international partner) if they kept quiet about the whole deal, but the law firm had broken the news to the public. The phone company's representative kept saying that they encourage their customer to work with them and didn't want to comment about any 'private conversations' with their customer. They blamed it on bad voicemail passwords on the customer's site that the 'hacker' had guessed at and used to initially get into the system that he exploited to make the calls. This is sounding like reactive fallout from phone companies that want to hinder similar bad press about their hacked system when this happens again, rather than spending money to fix what they can (some suggestions I can't remember were offered by the law firm in the interview).
... especially in a financial downturn. I have made large ERP acquisitions in the past, and we simply struck out the clauses we didn't like before signing the contract, and generally simply didn't pay what the supplier didn't complete exactly on time plus a 5% tolerance. And that was that.
I don't care about where I post, actually. Most of the time my comments, whether anon or id'd, don't even get scored. Once the first 200 people have posted, most /.'rs are only interested in posting humor or trolling. I tend to put factual posts in, that seldom get rated up, because the moderators lose interest in old topics. I'm surprised this one caught their attention. I have old posts with "0" ratings all over. As I result, I post less, too. Imo, the mods don't really want to see informative posts all that often.
In that case use an NDA for your work product. Don't try to put in language that says even if our product sucks, you can't tell anyone about it. If that crossed my desk, that would be brought up immediately and if not removed, we will find elsewhere to do business.
I have had numerous large businesses (higher tier contractors, as well as end users) pass on our work product and get someone else to beat the price. There are numerous companies we just respond "no thank you" to because they have pulled this on us in the past. We have put in a policy to reign in the marketing types so that we do not shop other contractors pricing to us and sure as hell do not pass on any tech work. Of course there will be negotiations, but you get what you pay for.
The problem is them using your breakdowns, tech write-ups, Q&A response, etc. to go elsewhere for a better price.
Simply have a lawyer-reviewed NDA set up and in place prior to providing the work. Then mark your entire proposal as Proprietary and Confidential, and put some teeth in the NDA that if your proprietary and confidential information is breached they are liable for all proposal effort and possible future lost revenue for disclosing your trade secrets (not certain if this applies, you should not be able to patent methods, only implementations, but IANAL).
Customers will always be able to take your bottom line price and say to another vendor, "Can you beat this?".
That will never change. But what I feel is irking you is the first part. Unless you are in a very tight niche, the "customer" will be doing this to other companies. Speak frankly with the other companies who most likely put out the same effort you did, only to have their work product sent to another company as yours was, and use the NDA to smack the customer down with the cost of your preparing the numerous revisions.
Yeah yeah, but you will lose business later from a bad reputation. Bullsh*t, if you have a good product it will stand on its own. Also may gain some respect (and business) from other small companies in your same position dealing with the same problems.
Or, you can play at business and give out your work for free until the funding dries up, or your company starts to take these "We'll lose a little on every job, but make it up in volume" jobs. That only works if you have very deep pockets and business divisions to pour the bad debt into to hold until the product is established and making money.
A friend of mine works for a city that uses Munis by Tyler Technologies.
1. Their tech support is East Coast, and they leave at 4pm their time. Friend is West Coast, which makes it impossible to get help after 1pm and chances are it will screw up your lunch hour.
2. They use SQL Server, but they use cursors and their performance sucks. If you're running a multi-hour job and it aborts, you're expected to do a point-in-time restore to the point before when the job started, so you wipe out all work done by the rest of the city done after that point.
3. They don't provide their users with a data dictionary, which makes producing your own views for reporting very tough.
4. They don't have a restartable printing system, so if you're printing a 2000 page document and the printer jams on page 1700, you restart the whole job.
These people seem to have no sense of scale: their tech might be ok for small installs, but not big ones.
PLEASE! Have a database expert on-staff before you buy an ERP/CRM system so they can give a good recommendation whether the vendor is properly implementing database technology!
Oh goodie! The old "If your not doing anything wrong what have you got to hide argument"
the Good Lord made Wikileaks.
There are several really high quality open-source ERP systems that have been getting some real traction in the press lately.
I was NOT surprised to learn that there are hundreds of Content Management Systems (CMS) available. Some are FREE to start using, some have to be purchased and others make their money via support contracts. How many of them are ERP solutions specifically I have not bothered to determine, though I know there are quite a few.
In 2001, Forester estimated that a BASIC Content Management System would cost over $650,000 and a fancier solution much, much more. Obviously the 2009 costs will not be less for a proprietary solution.
Why not take a basic free solution built with the minimal basic coding languages and hire one expert in the $130K - $180K and a few less experienced programmers in the $80K - $150K range and make the CMS or ERP solution do what you want it to do. I am sure that in the long term, having 100% control and ability to do what your company needs to do will far outweigh the cost savings over a locked in solution that will NEVER meet the needs of your business. Yet you will still have those cost savings on top of doing what the company needs to do since you can modify the system.
I agree with Use the tools that are simple and cheapest.
As long as the software product can be modified with the most basic of languages, say PHP, C, SQL + scripting shell languages; you will rest easy at night knowing that you can always bring in other languages Ruby, C++, Python, add-your-favorite-open source coding language here, too many to name, etc... and get the software to do what your company needs it to do. However if you bring in a tool that is based on a more complex language and/or tool than the reverse is NOT always true.
If the CMS / ERP system can NOT be modified with basic programming languages designed for the web, than you substitute vendor / proprietary lock in for programming language and tool lock in. No point in getting rid of one ball and chain (that will drag your business down) just to replace it with another.
High-end systems lack return on investment.
The fact that no vendor solution does everything that it is advertised to do just makes this choice seem all the more intelligent. So an upper level executive that will NOT consider an open source solution based on misguided interpretations of legalese (rhymes with sleaze) OR will only consider vendor lock in products (Microsoft, .NET, Oracle, WebSphere, etc...) should be reprimanded and possibly let go if they refuse to adapt. Especially given the current depressed economy, it will only get worse when we enter the depression due to stagflation.
There is no way they can justify the yearly / annual expenditures + licensing + customization fees + purchase price + capital expenditures to upgrade their IT infrastructure (hardware and software) as compared to an equivalent open source solution without FUD. Yet they do each and every fiscal year. And if you are HR or the company owner, are you paying them their salary to react out of FUD? Really, I think not. Is that what you based their bonus on? Yet for years and years this is exactly how IT has operated in large and most medium size companies. I am always amazed at how many company owners, investors and share holders simply do NOT bother to figure out how much of their equity is thrown away each and every quarter (and annually) because of these outdated and old school IT management philosophies and practices.
Is it still acceptable that they
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This definitely comes under "Stuff that Matters(TM)".
Here's another one:
OFBiz (previously known as Open For Business)