Software licensing as a viable model for customers should be placed under scrutiny. It's strange that CIO's spend a lot of time and effort in RFQ's, RFP's and ROI's to put software in place without sometimes reviewing the total cost of ownership. It struck me this morning that like an insidious disease, you could inflate your "fixed" overhead IT component over a period of time, and wake up to find that your available spend is being consumed by "maintenance" fees.
Lets assume that 55% of your budget is for maintenance and and infrastructure, less you salary and depreciation, this does not leave much room for any kind of intervention e.g. BPA, process innovation, tweaking etc. It places you as the CIO in a state of maintenance, which is the reverse of where you really want to be - making a strategic difference to business.
In my opinion, CIO's need to question the value add of ongoing license fees. Why pay them at all?
An option is to save the annual fees and plough that back into innovation and leveraging what you have. By the time you have reached the end of life of the software, the latest and greatest release, on another platform, a new set of infrastructure, open source alternatives or even a web2 environment will be available. By then, you may be in a better position to evaluate the next move.
Failing this, at least you would have leveraged your investment and got the value out of your software that was always the "unreachable" promise. The easy route is to muddy the waters and get something "better". Real CIO's make what they have work! after all, they were responsible for the RFP in the first place!"
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