John Halamka, CIO at CareGroup HealthCare System (and Harvard Clinical Research) writes in Computerworld about the empty calories in maintenance, and asks for pricing to reflect usage - a "safety rating" in insurance industry terms.
I proposed last week to Oracle (and the industry in general) a 3 tier model - 10% for customer category a) those happy at current release, with no desire to upgrade and mostly seeking bug fixes and tweaks (in line with what third party maintenance firms charge for basic support); 15% for category b) those that plan to stay and upgrade within their Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel etc family tracks and full rates for category c) those eager to get to next generation SaaS, SOA applications including Oracle's own Fusion.
It's the software industry's turn to react to proposals being made by folks like John and me. One price for all is a broken maintenance pricing model.
