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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?
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
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.
Simple. It probably didn't HAVE such a license back when they first went with the software. But through upgrades, license terms change.
They almost got us that way at the library. The company was EOF'ing the version we used of the card catalog system. The new version (besides being a LOT of money) had a license with terms similar to this.
Long story, short, we use an open source KOHA software. It has its warts (though less than you might think considering how "leading edge" we are in number of libraries running the system). But overall, we put a fraction of the upgrade cost for the commercial package into a "features" fund and we pay a company to develop features that we need as we need them. And the beautiful thing is once we pay to develop it, ANY library can use it. And vice versa. Open source feature has already paid off, too, since we found some features essential for our book mobile usage developed already by a library in Pennsylvania.
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.
Wow, the place you worked was being ripped off. We pay much less than that per transaction and nothing if the card is rejected for any reason.
I don't know, but it works for me.
I used to get weird contacts with all sorts of idiotic conditions. Best way to handle them, is to put the pressure back on them. Negotiate everything else and leave those until the final second, when the vendors are counting the money in their head and, then take out a large felt pen put a solid line through the conditions your don't like and initial each line with a pen and see if the salesman and in turn the sales manager can walk away from the sale and the commission.
Always remember that the sales staff are fighting to get every cent they can out of their 'own' company, any lost sale is personally bad for them and any future problems with the contract, months or years down track is 'somebody else's problem'. Other interesting things are, give an opportunity to their sales manager to demonstrate how much better they are at negotiating with the customer than the salesmen, even though they give you everything you want, they are still getting the sale when the salesmen failed and, of course simply call their bluff and see if they are truly willing to sue the customer in front of every other potential customer.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen