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support / maintenance

Jameslynch

New member
Hi All..

looking for a bit of advice..

We have 7 seats of Creo, including 1 Flex 3c, 1 Eng II, and 2 ISDX and AAX addons so our maintenance was coming in pretty high this year. and the reality is, we're still on Creo 3, and we are using more and more SolidWorks, because this is what our clients are asking for.

So we thought it prudent to look at down scaling our support (after our reseller trying to push us to subscription) to just 4 heavy seats. We were then told that if we do this, we would have to relinquish our licences that are no longer on support.. have anyone ever heard of this? so we couldn't run our 3 Creo parametric licences that we no longer have support for even though we bought the software outright?

any info appreciated.. but I'm tempted to just drop support completely (we only use it for software upgrades and right now we are on creo 3, moved to creo 4 when ever a client wants us to which we currently have licences for and move any other workload we have to solidworks and deal with creo 5 if / when we need to..)

really frustrated right now to be honest...
 
Going to subscription is an upgrade. So, your licensing is essentially changing. I just recently went through all this and in the long run the subscription is a bit less expensive, you get more modules usually for the same money. Only way to keep your existing licenses is to not change your version or license file. Once you import the new license file they will no longer be available. Any seats not on maintenance aren't eligible for the new license. Just like it wouldn't be eligible for a Creo 4 upgrade under the permanent licensing scheme.
 
I've never heard of that, but PTC has been changing their rules on maintenance. I don't think they can stop you from using the licenses that you already have and can't change the terms of those licenses. However, I suspect that they can refuse to sell you maintenance on some seats without changing the terms of the others. I'm not sure.

PTC has been trying to move everyone to subscription, and actually have been making some rather attractive offers to do so. It's worth looking into. Also, they evidently announced this year at LiveWorrx that Creo will get annual updates each March starting with Creo 5 in 2018. That should boost the return on our annual maintenance or subscription payments. They've said that before, though, we'll see how it goes.
 
I don't like the subscription model. In the long run you pay more for it. However, you do have more flexibility. You can change the number of licenses each year through subscription. You can not only add licenses (as you always could) but you can also decrease the number of licenses you have...provided you give PTC sufficient notification time.
 

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