For several years now the company where I work as been on an Software & Maintenance for Rad Studio. The key benefits that I really like are:
- Support Incidents for when we run into a bug that we can not find a work around. They work with us to find a solution the problem at hand. Sometimes it's been a quick and easy problem for the support team and some time more difficult, ultimately we end up with something that works. One time we ended up with special version of the compiler to solve our problems so we could stay working. To be honest we don't have to contact support very often at all but it is nice to know it is there.
- New version just arrive without having to deal with a purchasing nightmare, the budget stays relatively fixed so it's easy to plan the budget around the cost.
- My entire team can participate in beta tests.
The Support and Maintenance program was recently was renamed to Update Subscription, and some of the terms have changed. Ultimately I believe these changes are good thing, but has some hurdles to get over, that some customers may not like. Specifically that customer need to be on Update Subscription to the full set of bug fixes. But some of the new terms allow for the following:
- Ongoing maintenance for up to 2 yrs for major version and up to 3 concurrent major versions. This really means that our XE6 and XE8 should be getting some of the bug fixes from XE8 coming to it. This is really helpful as we can't keep our entire code base current.
- Webinars and web content that is just for Update Subscription customers.
We chose not to upgrade to XE8 as we have projects going on right now. These projects can't afford a delay that would come with an major upgrade the development tools. But under Update Subscription have value coming for XE6 and XE7 which we do use. I look forward to those releases but do wish we had an idea when they may be coming.
So in short I like the Update Subscription.
