What's the point of maintenance?

[HSP]

I'm an Enterprise customer, I keep my support/maintenance up to date, and recently renewed for another year. With just about every other company that offers annual maintenance programs, you get new features as they're added to the application package. In many cases, as competition increases, features are moved into lower tiers so they can benefit from them as newer features are added to higher tiers. VMware is a great recent example of this, moving some features down the ladder while adding more advanced features to their top tiers in version 5 and 5.1.

Veeam, however, is completely backwards. Despite my paying maintenance for enterprise licenses, cloud edition was not made available to me. Now, with the upcoming release of V7, you're introducing a new tier, Enterprise Plus, further making your maintenance agreements useless. In fact, most of the new features are only available in the new Enterprise Plus tier! Add to that your whopping 25% increase in maint costs, and Veeam seems to be aiming to drain my IT budget dry rather than provide a good backup solution.

Keep gouging us for more money, and we'll go find another solution.

-H

[Helqasem]

I'm an Enterprise customer, I keep my support/maintenance up to date, and recently renewed for another year. With just about every other company that offers annual maintenance programs, you get new features as they're added to the application package. In many cases, as competition increases, features are moved into lower tiers so they can benefit from them as newer features are added to higher tiers. VMware is a great recent example of this, moving some features down the ladder while adding more advanced features to their top tiers in version 5 and 5.1.

Veeam, however, is completely backwards. Despite my paying maintenance for enterprise licenses, cloud edition was not made available to me. Now, with the upcoming release of V7, you're introducing a new tier, Enterprise Plus, further making your maintenance agreements useless. In fact, most of the new features are only available in the new Enterprise Plus tier! Add to that your whopping 25% increase in maint costs, and Veeam seems to be aiming to drain my IT budget dry rather than provide a good backup solution.

Keep gouging us for more money, and we'll go find another solution.

-H

Your information is incorrect. Cloud Edition is a separate offering with an entirely different licensing structure. There are alternatives to the Cloud Edition functionality in the non-Cloud v7.

Of the 60+ new features in v7 only 3 require Enterprise Plus the rest are available in either Standard or Enterprise versions. Additionally, as an existing Enterprise customer you are entitled to a "free" upgrade to Enterprise Plus, but this is optional and you must request this to receive the Enterprise Plus features.

Hope this helps.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Hunter,

Thank you for your feedback, but I would agree with Hani - most of the new features are available in Standard and Enterprise editions, so you can upgrade to v7 to use these features for free with the same cost for maintenance. Also we do understand that some customers would like to use features available in Enterprise Plus edition, that is why we are grandfathering all of our existing customers (as of end of Q2 2013) to Enterprise Plus Edition at no charge. So you have an option either to get Enterprise Plus edition for free but with the increased maintenance fee or upgrade to Enterprise Edition for free keeping your maintenance cost at the same level.

Hope this helps.

[scott.anderson]

I'm an Enterprise customer, I keep my support/maintenance up to date, and recently renewed for another year. With just about every other company that offers annual maintenance programs, you get new features as they're added to the application package. In many cases, as competition increases, features are moved into lower tiers so they can benefit from them as newer features are added to higher tiers. VMware is a great recent example of this, moving some features down the ladder while adding more advanced features to their top tiers in version 5 and 5.1.

Veeam, however, is completely backwards. Despite my paying maintenance for enterprise licenses, cloud edition was not made available to me. Now, with the upcoming release of V7, you're introducing a new tier, Enterprise Plus, further making your maintenance agreements useless. In fact, most of the new features are only available in the new Enterprise Plus tier! Add to that your whopping 25% increase in maint costs, and Veeam seems to be aiming to drain my IT budget dry rather than provide a good backup solution.

Keep gouging us for more money, and we'll go find another solution.

-H

Hunter sounds more like your Reseller doesn't understand the licensing. Current Veeam maintenance has always allowed you to upgrade to the current version of your license. So if you have support and have Enterprise licensing now then you can upgrade at no cost to v7 Enterprise on release and get all of the extra features. The upgrade to Enterprise Plus is also free to current customers (purchased before end of June)with valid maintenance until November. Your existing maintenance term will apply to that upgrade and you only start paying the extra maintenance that Enterprise Plus comes with, when your current maintenance term expires.

Sounds like a very generous licensing package, compared to the likes of Symantec, if you ask me!