Does Your Vendor Issue Gag Orders? 210
Presto Vivace writes to tell us that CIO has an interesting article about customer "gag orders" that some ERP vendors are trying to impose contractually. "The effect: customers will be prevented from working with peers and others in the software company's "ecosystem" to help with technical issues or compare pricing options. 'In addition,' Wang adds, 'the customer now lacks the proper checks and balances in pressuring a vendor to deliver on promised capabilities or address severe security issues, and cannot go to the media as a last resort, if needed.'" What other questionable practices (and potential solutions) have others had to work with?
All we need now is a homeland security tie-in (Score:4, Interesting)
Since ERP is critical to many organizations, all we need now is a homeland security tie-in and anyone who complains about how shitty their ERP package is gets hauled off for interrogation.
Don't laugh, I'm only about 3% joking about this.
Good luck (Score:5, Interesting)
"and cannot go to the media as a last resort, if needed.'"
Is that a joke? What an interesting story that would be.
Re:Intelligence is needed in software companies... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pirating software can be an effective business strategy. Think about it -- when you pirate software you might be sued for software piracy. When you pay for it, you might be sued for breach of contract.
Which is worse?
Re:Let them sue (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe they'll be like the credit card companies and the stupid card-charge rules. You can't transfer the charge directly to the customer, offer discounts for cash/check/etc, or have a minimum purchase.
The CC companies are smart on this one, so far, I've not heard of them litigating against an offender. Since their end probably wouldn't hold up, that's about the only way the contract would be honored by anyone.
I hope the companies with these gag orders won't be that smart.
Consumer law (Score:5, Interesting)
Customers force a need for these (Score:4, Interesting)
I get the impression a lot of people who say that restrictions on what you can say about your service is immoral, even if it isn't illegal, haven't experienced what it's like to be at a very small IT company.
Customers will mess you around big time. They'll get you to spend a lot of time preparing an assessment and quote, get you to travel halfway around the country to have a 45 minute meeting with you which is fair enough. However they'll then take your proposal, show it to another company who spend some time figuring out how they'd provide a similar service and travel up for a meeting. The customer would then say "can you do this £500 cheaper?". If they say yes they go back to the first company to see if they'll go lower.
You can argue this is just being sensible but in truth, you're using up a lot of other people's time and eventually they'll have next to no profit margin but can't give up the contract because so much time has been invested already. Whilst this is going on, the company has to take the focus away from looking for new contracts to work with them.
This can utterly destroy small businesses who need a steady stream of income to keep their head above water. I work for a company who suffers from this but thankfully it's comprised of a lot of small companies in similar situations and they'll warn each other if there's a customer wasting time like this. Not every company is IBM, Microsoft etc. who can absorb the cost of these customers. We were almost driven to administration by one particular religious group who, after stringing us along for a month and having us draw up a complex proposal and organise government assistance for them, decided to show our proposal to a different company and get them to undercut us.
Many companies have no choice but to force NDAs on lots of aspects of proposals because of this.
Re:Why would any one? (Score:4, Interesting)
Simple. It probably didn't HAVE such a license back when they first went with the software. But through upgrades, license terms change.
They almost got us that way at the library. The company was EOF'ing the version we used of the card catalog system. The new version (besides being a LOT of money) had a license with terms similar to this.
Long story, short, we use an open source KOHA software. It has its warts (though less than you might think considering how "leading edge" we are in number of libraries running the system). But overall, we put a fraction of the upgrade cost for the commercial package into a "features" fund and we pay a company to develop features that we need as we need them. And the beautiful thing is once we pay to develop it, ANY library can use it. And vice versa. Open source feature has already paid off, too, since we found some features essential for our book mobile usage developed already by a library in Pennsylvania.
Large Enterprises (Score:4, Interesting)
In large enterprises, the "click through license" usually means nothing. Lawyers have gotten together to determine the true agreement.
But, some of those signed agreements are really, really stupid - sorta like the finance guy who would search ebay for better pricing on Cisco $150k switches. Idiot.
The PHB is usually a huge idiot when it comes to software. He/she got where they were by demanding action "install CRM this year", then holding all pay raises for 10,000 people in IT hostage until it is done.
Where I worked, Microsoft gave us a bunch of BPM free software. It turns out they needed some sucker/company to stress test it. What a joke. There software performance was tied to how big/fast your MS-SQL server clusters were since **every** transaction, no matter how short lived, had to be put into the DB. In the end, it couldn't keep up and we wasted 9 months with MS engineering/support. We deployed a few IBM P-series servers with 24 CPUs and switched to a UNIX BPM solution that could scale the way we needed in just a few months. Done.
The 120 windows servers were never fully reused before their warranties ran out. MS hadn't certified anything on VMs at the time.
I'm probably violating an agreement talking about this now. That was under company that was bought out by an even larger company a few years ago.
Re:Let them sue (Score:2, Interesting)
Last I saw, Mastercard had a requirement for merchants that they not set a minimum transaction amount. If a merchant was caught doing this, Mastercard would terminate their business dealings with them.
Re:Let them sue (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, the place you worked was being ripped off. We pay much less than that per transaction and nothing if the card is rejected for any reason.
Re:All we need now is a homeland security tie-in (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to get weird contacts with all sorts of idiotic conditions. Best way to handle them, is to put the pressure back on them. Negotiate everything else and leave those until the final second, when the vendors are counting the money in their head and, then take out a large felt pen put a solid line through the conditions your don't like and initial each line with a pen and see if the salesman and in turn the sales manager can walk away from the sale and the commission.
Always remember that the sales staff are fighting to get every cent they can out of their 'own' company, any lost sale is personally bad for them and any future problems with the contract, months or years down track is 'somebody else's problem'. Other interesting things are, give an opportunity to their sales manager to demonstrate how much better they are at negotiating with the customer than the salesmen, even though they give you everything you want, they are still getting the sale when the salesmen failed and, of course simply call their bluff and see if they are truly willing to sue the customer in front of every other potential customer.