Pro/E licence downgrade

[iturner_frl]

Hi all

Over the years PTC has given our company great offers to upgrade our pro/e licences to high end packages, but this has added quite a lot to the maintenance bill.

Now we want to downgrade some of our licences from flex3c (or whatever it is called this week) to licences that match what users are doing. So we have a mix of mid range and high end licences.

However PTC insist that we have to rebuy the lower functionality licences. Which is a substantial investment.

Has anyone managed to downgrade PTC licences at no cost?

All ptc have to do is re-issue a new licence file with the functionality turned off. PTC are adamant that they won't budge on this.



Ian

 

[Mindripper]

Sounds like PTC's usual contempt for their customers to me. Thier sales group has mastered the canned demo, the oversell and now the maintenance nightmare.

 

[dr_gallup]

We fell for that trick too. I just tell them what modules we will pay maintenance on. They can take that or nothing. Been doing it for years. Only downside is that I have to fight the battle every year. No "relicensing". Just decline maintenance on what you don't want anymore.

 

[Mindripper]

Way to go, dr_gallup: stickin' it to The Man. But perhaps PTC UK has a serious attitude problem, whilethe US side of PTC is more pragmatic: other recent topics suggest this - and the mass exodus of customers that this can cause. But let's face it: PTC has always suffered from an attitude problem.

 

[dr_gallup]

Believe me, PTC corporate has a serious attitude problem.

 

[vandewinckel]

We also downgraded one of the higher end package to a package that fit the needs of the designer. We have PTC maintenance on all of the licenses. We justified buying a new licenses (a lower package) by dropping the maintenance fee on the higher end package. The difference in cost of the lower end maintenance to the higher end maintenace fee showed about a 3 year pay back. We had a 3 year pay changing from a package with NC programming to a package without. If you're going from a flex3c package to a foundation the pay back should be less.

 

[dr_gallup]

You should not have to pay to downgrade! Just tell them how which of your existing modules you are willing to pay maintenance on, drop the rest. Instant payback. In our case we pay about 50% of the maintenance PTC bills us. Have to fight with them every year but they can take it or leave it.

 

[jfixsen]

We did the same thing several years ago to get all of our licenses to match up. We had a stable build of everything, so we went 3 years without maintenance, and then just bought all new licenses when we went to WF2.0.

 

[vandewinckel]

jfixsen


How did the cost of the new licenses and the build updatescompare to the cost of themaintenance fee. I thought about dropping the maintenance but it didn't seam to save that much. Ifwe updated every two years and purchased no build updates we would save about half. If we updated every year and purchased all the build updates it was about a wash.

 

[jfixsen]

Our deal was that we had been using Pro/E since about 1994 and of the 5 licenses that we had, two were foundation, one was advanced assembly, and the other two were a hoge-poge of stuff. They wouldn't update our hoge-poge licenses to foundation licenses, so we dropped maintanence on all of them, and then bought 4 new foundations and 1 advanced assembly license. They wanted to sell us new licenses anyway, so we just kept our maintanence for those 3 years and then bought new licenses. The cost of the licenses came down over that time as well since they're getting more competition from Solid Works and what not.


Side note- We are kind of in the same spot with AutoCAD now. We have 2004 for some legacy stuff and would like to update to 2007, but now AutoDesk wants like $5000 for an AutoCAD license because they think that they can compete in the solid modeling world. They are just as nuts!

 

[dr_gallup]

One of the things that really pisses me off about PTC's pricing structure is that they want to keep charging maintenance as a percentage of the full list price at the time of purchase. However, they won't let you have any of the new capabilities that they add without paying an upgrade fee + maintenance on the upgrade. So they penalize existing customers 3 ways.

1) You paid more initially
2) You pay to upgrade
3) You pay much higher maintenance

I have seriously considered dropping maintenance for 3 years and then buying all new licenses. That way you get the latest in functionality. No if only PTC would have a really good stable release that I could live with for 3 years!