Veeam Maintenance Pricing increase?

[chimera]

I have a few clients complaining about the fact that Veeam have changed their pricing twice this year already, in February and May. I believe thats about a 15% rise in maintenance over the past 5 months. Some of them are now looking at alternate products. I like Veeam, but am now stuck between recommending it albeit at a higher price to the customer, vs competitive products. How come the double price increase in only 5 months?

[J1mbo]

I don't want to defend Veeam pricing particularly, but the product is still good value compared to pretty much everything else. And it's benefits can be indirect too, for example I'm looking at storage and realising actually I just don't need almost any features in the arrays, since Veeam covers everything I need.

[Gostev]

Hmm, have not heard of any changes in maintenance pricing, but I will check.

James has a good point too, people don't realize how many indirect saving they get through the product. For example, no one else will give you backup modes with transform option (allowing to keep a single full backup no matter of retention policy), and very few will give you built-in deduplication. The result is 3-4 times less backup storage required. I cannot imagine any small, price sensitive customer for whom even small increase in maintenance is a problem willing to pay for quadrupling its backup storage to achieve the required retention policy with other products. That would cost the same as 3x new Veeam licensing... 15x more than maintenance!

[Gostev]

So far I have confirmed that globally:
- No double price increase happened for sure (February was, and will remain the only price increase in 2012).
- There were no changes to maintenance pricing at all past years (in terms of percent of list price).
- The list price increase in February did affect maintenance pricing of course. However, we started to communicate this increase to existing customers 6 months in advance, specifically to allow them to purchase additional sockets as well as multi-year maintenance at the existing prices. We have clearly communicated this opportunity, warning them that starting February, both new licenses and maintenance costs will increase. So, if they did not act having received so many advance warnings, it is a little bit strange why they are complaining now - just 3 month later.

Chimera, what region are you from? I will try to find out if something has happened in May that is specific to your region.

[chimera]

Hi Gostev,
My clients are in the Asia/Pacific region (we're based in New Zealand) Would be interested to see whats changed
Cheers

[chimera]

Just had the official word back from a renewal representative at Veeam via email after I posted the above... seems I got it partly wrong due to the Enterprise upgrade I had forgotton they had upgraded too, my apologies... client name and discounting removed....

The renewal price for ******** has increased mainly because of the upgrade to Enterprise edition on 11/28/2011. The renewal price for Backup Enterprise is approximately 35% higher than Backup Standard renewal price because of the extended functionality. Thus, the higher price is a result of the customer’s moving to a new product, but not of Veeam prices growth.

Besides, by now our prices have changed only once this year – in February 2012. And as for the price growth, it is based on the global tendency and Veeam investments into our R&D to introduce serious improvement in terms of functionality with all new versions of our products. In case of **********, now the customer may download a new version of Backup – Version 6.1, which contains powerful new functionality, including: VeeamZIP, redesigned console and more. Here are all the details: What's New document.

Further, we are pleased to offer our customers multi-year renewal, which allows the customers to get active support for current fixed price with ** / **% discount for 2/ 3-year renewal respectively.

Please kindly pass this information to the customer or let me know if you would like me to contact **************

Please let me know if you have any questions.