[p4] Paying Perforce Support

Wed May 17 03:28:29 PDT 2006

Because you're cheating on the "insurance company".

What you want to do is to pay for the "policy" only after you've crashed
your car.

Insurance companies wont play this game because they'd go out of
business pretty quickly.  Support organisations are similar.  If you
only pay for them when you actually KNOW you need them, they need to
provision for full support.

And that means you'd pay more.

Paul.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Williams [mailto:streak at narus.com] 
Sent: 17 May 2006 09:26
To: Jason McClellan; perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Paying Perforce Support

Maybe it's just me, but I've always had a problem with this
"back-support" idea. If I choose not to pay for support for a year, why
should I be penalized later when I DO want to pay for support?
Afterall, any issues that arose in the support-less year were solved
without support's help.  I doubt many people look at it from the
perspective of not burdening them with support questions for a year.
It's only, "if we charge back-support, customers will reconsider ever
stopping support".

That said, I've used support on occasion and it's always been prompt.
I'd never consider not paying for support since it's cheap in the scope
of things.

--Jason

________________________________

From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com on behalf of Jason McClellan
Sent: Tue 5/16/2006 2:54 PM
To: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Paying Perforce Support

:) lol we have had this problem so many times with OTHER packages
support. They renew the first year. Nothing goes wrong, so next year
they say 'why bother, we got nothing for our money' and don't renew.
Then something goes wrong, and you spend hours, or days, scouring
forums, searching the net, whatever trying to make it work figure out
what went wrong, only to find out that after your support expired, there
was a new version released, containing a bug fix for the problem you
have. That you wouldn't have had, if you were still on support. That you
can only get, by paying the back-support, renewal fees, then renewing
support again.  Nice.

We are a small shop. There are only a few devs using P4 plus me. P4
sends you nice annual renewal notices and new license files that say
things like 'expires' in them. Even though your _license_ doesn't
expire, only your support does. Before we bought P4 the devs and I
decided we would simply tell accounting that the license must be renewed
annually. So when it expires, we have to renew it or they can't work :)

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Whitfield, Greg
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 1:02 PM
To: Jamison, Shawn; Monica Sanchez; perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Paying Perforce Support

But if I stuck my manager-with-a-budget hat on, I would argue with these
figures. You hinted that that developers could get on with other stuff,
and as a manager that is what I would pick up on to argue about. Also,
will all your engineers really submit at least once in 10 hours?
Probably not. So many engineers will in fact be largely unaffected.

I would also ask how many times we have been affected by Perforce being
down? If MTBF seems to be once or twice a year, then maybe I'll pay
attention. If it is less than this, then I may decide to preserve my
budget and risk it. If it's more I may ask why we are using Perforce in
the first place :)

I would change my figures to reflect actual expected usage. E.g. based
on past usage, 25% of users need to submit in a typical 10 hour time
frame. Keep the hairy figures grounded in reality - maybe provide a
worst/best case.

By the way I'm not advocating not paying support! Indeed I would not be
without it. But if you are doing a cost justification exercise you have
to be prepared to have your figures picked apart.

Greg
~~~~

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Jamison, Shawn
Sent: 16 May 2006 16:39
To: Monica Sanchez; perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Paying Perforce Support

Two things.
You need to talk to the Project managers to get the dollar per hour
amount they use to estimate the cost of a project.  It is also called
the "fully burdened rate" for an employee.

Then you need to calculate the downtime from when an issue with the
perforce server appears and no one can check in to when it is resolved,
including the time it takes to purchase support.

Now comes the fun part!!!

Number of developers X total hours down X Fully Burdened Rate = total
cost of down time. 

It's a real eye opener.  For example 30 developers down for 10 business
hours and a burdened rate of $55.00 an hour would look like this.

        30 X 10 X $55.00 = $16,500.00 for the cost of the downtime. 

This is projected costs or estimated costs.  Some work can still be done
but it's a good way to open up some glazed over managers eyes.
Especially when you start dealing with 500 developers.  You can justify
almost any expense to keep that many users up %99.999 of the time.

I my case that same downtime could have cost:

        500 X 10 X $55.00 = $275,000.00

-Shawn J>

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Monica Sanchez
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 9:48 AM
To: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: [p4] Paying Perforce Support

Hi,

I'm in the process of renewing Perforce maintenance. The company I'm
working for right now only upgraded (pay for) when needed before. Could
you give me ideas on how to sell to my managers the importance of paying
support?

I think Perforce is an excellent product and the price is a bargain. I
did the last upgrade without any big problems, but we are planning to
change the tracking system, I'd like to use the WEB interface and I know
that I need to develop more triggers in the near future.

The data we have on Perforce is critical for our company and I think
this is the main reason I'd like to get support.

Let me know your ideas.

Thanks,

Monica Sanchez

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