My recent story about Bentley Systems' "cover-one, cover all" maintenance policy elicited comments from a number of Bentley customers who have experienced the same treatment. As you might expect, none were very happy about Bentley's requirement that all licenses be covered by a maintenance agreement or surrendered. But one reader I heard from was even less happy, as Bentley is not even giving his company the option of surrendering unwanted licenses.
"Our Bentley rep is trying to tell us that we cannot ever surrender any of our licenses," the reader wrote. "We have quite a lot of Bentley and Haestad products, including almost 200 licenses of Microstation. We only need 100 licenses max and had suspended about 50 of them several years ago. Now they say we must cover all of the licenses under maintenance, including the bunch we 'mothballed,' and that we can't drop any. This is going to cost us another $60,000 on top of the $130,000 we already give them."
I asked the reader why he couldn't just refuse to pay the extra $60,000 - surely Bentley wouldn't turn down his check if he wrote it for just the licenses he wants to keep under maintenance? "They are holding a WAN Agreement over my head, stating that we have to 'cover-all' in order to get it," the reader said. "We signed a 'Select' agreement with them back in 1998 and have been operating with pooled licensing since, with our Bentley rep's knowledge. If we don't get a WAN Agreement then we will have to go back to separate servers for each office, something we would definitely prefer not to do."
Because Bentley knows that the reader has far more Microstation licenses than he'll ever need -- particularly because most of his company's new customers now mandate AutoCad - the reader had little leverage as he tried to negotiate a better deal. "I was able to remove a couple of the items that were to be added to maintenance and get our costs down some," he updated me recently. "That was mostly because, on some the Haestad products, we had a document from Haestad showing we had given up several licenses some time ago. But Bentley was not accommodating on anything -- I still can't drop any old licenses."
The reader thinks he has little choice but to go ahead and pay for maintenance on all the licenses, including the ones his company stopped using years ago. "I told them that our company would not be buying any more Bentley or Haestad products," he wrote. "If we absolutely have to have a package, we'll lease so we don't take ownership. And since we're in the middle of multiple acquisitions, I've told my CEO to make sure the purchasing agreement says we will not take ownership of any Bentley or Haestad products. Bentley's saying that if I buy a package from them, I am committing to keep it on maintenance for as long as I want to use any of their products. That makes buying Bentley, and paying for maintenance forever, a really bad idea."
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