I listened to Jim Schaper introduce the concept of Infor Flex today. Includes plans to upgrade to their SOA solutions, or exchange licenses towards another Infor solution. That is goodness, though the listed discounts and transaction fees will need customer analysis and haggling.
But there is no downgrade path. If customers only want a low-touch plan – some bug fixes, minimal number of support calls, regulatory updates – you have to keep paying at full rates. As I have written before, customer needs and vendor delivery speeds (and their support costs) vary considerably making it very hard to justify a single maintenance rate across the product lifecycle – so my suggestion about letting maintenance rates float
To a question I asked, Jim responded “Unlike what we are reading about our competitors, we are not seeing as much defection in our customer base to SaaS or third party maintenance. Besides we will offer SaaS in several components of our offering”.
In other words, our customers are peachy and not really asking about flex down. Interestingly enough, we hear the same thing from from Lawson, Oracle and SAP with a similar qualifier - “We read their customers (those of our competitors) are asking for it, but not ours”. A whole lot of reading going on.
With that definition of flex, remind me to not buy any bungee cord from any of them :)
Update: Frank Scavo and Ray Wang are more positive about Infor's announcement. Dennis Howlett less so.
