When a software company is acquired, do its customers always suffer as a result? Lending some credence to that idea is the lament of a long-time Rational Software customer over the changes he's seen since that company was acquired by IBM.
"We've been using several of Rational Software's developer tools for years - ClearCase, Rose, and PurifyPlus mainly," the reader wrote. "They had always been one of the better companies to deal with, and they really understood the issues that developers and developers' IT staffs face. Phone support was great -- I could be talking to a very knowledgeable engineer within a minute usually. Pricing was fair, and I don't think we experienced any maintenance increases over a period of four-plus years. Patches and upgrades were clearly documented and generally installed without a hitch. Accurate renewal quotes were sent out a couple months in advance. The website was only fair, but information was pretty easy to get to."
All that started to change in February 2003 when IBM completed the acquisition of Rational. "The wheels have pretty much fallen off after the IBM acquisition," the reader wrote. "The proverbial straw that broke my back was the recent quote I received for maintenance. After years of no increases, the first quote had an almost 40 percent increase. When I asked whether this was a mistake, I was told it wasn't. When I objected, I was allowed some leeway - only a 10 percent increase this year, then the rest, to bring it to 40 percent the following year. I asked if there were any additional benefits to go along with the increase, but I still haven't gotten a satisfactory answer and don't really expect to."
And it's not just the higher prices for maintenance that bothers the reader. "Besides the increase, all the good things I mentioned about Rational have deteriorated to varying degrees," he wrote. "The website has migrated over to the IBM info-maze. Phone support takes longer to reach an engineer, and unfortunately many of the best engineers seemed to have left. Patching and upgrading is a mess -- the Windows-based product patching methodology changes every few months. In my experience, IBM doesn't really understand how to make a product that ISVs can work with and support. For example, Websphere and DB2 pretty much assume you're only going to have one instance of one version of a product on a machine. It's a great way to sell hardware, but a tough way for an ISV to maintain a support infrastructure that can easily handle customers using multiple versions of multiple products. The IBM way seems to be creeping into the old Rational products: we now face the prospect of upgrading all three of the Rational products simultaneously the next time one of them needs to be upgraded, even though we've always used them as separate 'point' products with no integration."
Of course, the reader recognizes that even IBM's 40 percent hike in maintenance fees isn't as bad as it might have been had a certain other company acquired Rational. Under Rational, he says, his annual maintenance fees were 20 percent of the original cost of the licenses, pretty much the industry standard rate these days. "My quote from IBM, before they relented and only increased the rate by 10 percent, was for an amount that figures out to 27.5 percent of the original license cost," the reader wrote. "Maybe they figure it's OK compared to Microsoft and its 29 percent for Software Assurance. At least for 27.5 percent, IBM will actually throw in some tech support!"
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