Yada yada, take my money: Firms do not scrutinise software support spend – report

Companies waste cash by failing to scrutinise software maintenance and support spend, with contract renewal seen as the line of least resistance, the Campaign for Clear Licensing has said. According to the campaign's research, just 10 per cent of companies invested in IT asset management (ITAM) when deciding to renew their …

[BobChip]

Contract renewal

What about some sort of "Compare the Market" for IT contract renewal? Not sure how this could be made to work in practice, but it could put the wind up some of the major suppliers .......

Just a thought

[BillG]

Re: Contract renewal

Someone needs to please grammar check this entire article, starting with the very first sentence:

Companies waste cash by failing to scrutinise software maintenance and support spend, with contract renewal seen as the line of least resistance, the Campaign for Clear Licensing has said.

[The First Dave]

Pretty simple maths really - do you want to spend hundreds of man-hours, and loads of real pounds on implementing a system that _might_ be able to save us a few percent, or do you just want to renew this bill that was due yesterday?

[Daniel von Asmuth]

Programmers don't want to earn salaries

Apart from maybe Microsoft, nobody seems to be making any money from selling software these days. Such software as you could buy consequently is half-finished.

In order to finish, companies need to sell support in order to feed their programmers and to get the software 90 % finished by the time it is replaced by the next version.

Without support, all yyou have is lots of dubious repositories of free (as in free beer) source code. which takes to years to turn into something workable. You shoyld support costs to the personnell costs of doing it in house.

[Ian 55]

Having looked at a bunch of small businesses

They're nearly all crap when it comes to managing best value when it comes to contracts for utilities etc, so why should their IT spend be any different.

It was the lot who were paying BT to rent an answerphone they'd chucked years ago that I remember the most. BT was happy to take the money.

On the other hand, BT didn't make it clear what they were paying for and the full BT pricelist is a notorious swamp of 'they're paying too much and we'll keep taking the money until they wise up' tariffs and charges.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Having looked at a bunch of small businesses

the full BT pricelist is a notorious swamp of 'they're paying too much and we'll keep taking the money until they wise up' tariffs and charges

That's how most recurring service providers operate, be that IT, BPO, insurance, energy, telecoms etc.

The savvy, engaged, disloyal customers get the good deals, the lazy, distracted or dim lose out. Just like buying groceries, cars, brown goods or anything else.

[gbshore]

Business Value Ecosystem

Technology in and of itself without understanding how technology maps to business value and outcomes, is a commodity and a line item cost. ITAM as a tracker of assets does not address business value and aligning with corporate goals. Technology Business Management (TBM) is an approach that allows companies to align IT spend and investments to where they should invest based on business priorities. Software Maintenance and Support is just a single component of understanding how you run and manage the business of IT. This gets businesses away from a simple cost discussion into a strategic one, whereby, C Suite, Finance, IT and the Lines of Business can work together to make the best value based decisions for the company as a whole.