Hi Pete,
I had a similar problem last July. There was a whole thread about it on
Midrange-L at the time. Here's a link:
http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/200707/msg00431.html
Ultimately, we resolved the problem by switching to what they called an
LPAR license (even though we're not using an LPAR... not exactly sure
how that works). With this license, we paid them something like $7000
and they promised that from this point on, we wouldn't have to deal with
the insane upgrade fees anymore, because they don't apply to this LPAR
licensing model.
But even the $7k seems more than a little ridiculous just to transfer
from one machine to another. But Inovis maintains that they price by
the CPW, not by the software tier. They say that they do this because
customers who previously ran on a P10 (for example) might no longer need
a P10 because the machines are faster, so they'll buy a P05 and run just
as many EDI transactions, and Inovis feels that they were ripped off, so
they changed their pricing strategy to be based purely on CPW. That's
they're story.
I don't agree with their philosophy, because I consider it normal
business to replace a machine every few years. After all, there's wear
and tear on a machine. Since downtime is costly, you need to replace it
every several years, and without exception, the new machine is going to
be faster than the old one. The fact that Inovis wants to charge you
huge upgrade fees when you're just maintaining the status quo is absurd.
But, we were kinda stuck with Inovis, since the alternative was to
re-write all of our software that relies on them. For someone who is
just starting out, I suggest not using Inovis, at least until they come
up with a better way of doing licensing.
JMHO.
Pete Massiello wrote:
We have an account going from a 270 which is a P05 tier group to a 515 which
is also a P05 tier. They use Innovis for their EDI, and they wish to charge
the customer $11,000 for keys. No new functionality, customer is already on
maintenance, customer will not have any more EDI transactions, customer will
get nothing from this at all. Every other vendor that we had on the 270 had
no charge, or a small paperwork charge (which is fine).
Has anyone else had this nightmare dealing with Innovis? Any other EDI
software providers that you prefer.
Thanks
Pete Massiello
midrange.com
