Blog: Craig Schiff

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Hyperion's Controversial Upgrade Fee

Hyperion users with an up to date maintenance agreement are being asked to pay an 'enablement fee' to upgrade to Hyperion System 9. Users are asking 'isn't that what we pay maintenance fees for in the first place?'. You can read Hyperion's response here. This is an important issue for all software vendors and customers - when are new releases covered by maintenance fees and when are they not? In general, maintenance covers continued hotline support, bug fixes, and product updates. Most product updates are really just a collection of bug fixes with some minor enhancements thrown in for good measure. What do you do however, when a product update is more major than that? When key aspects of the product have been re-architected/re-written? I believe this is the case with System 9.

I was at Hyperion when they went from their DOS product (Micro Control) to the first Windows version (Hyperion, then Enterprise). This was obviously a complete re-write. For a period of time though existing users were offered a free upgrade to the Windows product. The reason wasn't that we thought it was part of their maintenance fees, it was that we didn't want to be stuck maintaining a DOS version forever. In addition, we needed some quick references for the Windows product. So, with that in mind I would say that it's ok to charge an additional fee for significant new code, but on the other hand you need to be ready to support (hotline, fixes, minor enhancements) the prior version for an extended period. In that way the benefits of the upgrade and its additional cost are truly optional. If Hyperion doesn't do that its customers may begin looking at the price differential between the upgrade fee and the cost of a new system from a competitor. Your thoughts?

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