Re: Machine and System Information on one report, compliments of Inovis TrustedLink EDI

Sadly this is the standard path:

1) Some folks get an idea and write some software. They are enthusiastic, they write good stuff, they are cheap. Their customers get good support because they care about the product and their customers. Features are added rapidly and pricing remains reasonable. Upgrade charges are minimal or non-existent so long as you have a support contract. The company does well and is well liked.

2) Somebody offers the founders a bunch of money. They take it. The new owners have a lot of debt to service or a large investment to recoup. Either way many good folks lose their jobs, support suffers, new features go the way of the dodo bird and prices skyrocket. Because they often don't know the platform, pricing and support rules make the new owners look like idiots. In one case a customer of mine was told $1,300,000 to step up a whopping, ginourmous, humongous, 30 (Yes Thirty) CPW. This was more than double what they had paid in 12 years as a customer including all acquisition, support, and training costs.

3) New installs fall to near zero. Customers drain away as they get the new pricing or can't get new features.

So my rule: If your software provider has been purchased watch for these symptoms and be ready with a new solution when you detect them.

Are you listening: Help Systems? Softlanding? Inovis? BPCS? Infor? And the list goes on....

When they were known as ACS Network Systems and later Premenos, they were
reasonably priced, had excellent support, and had a good reputation. I
often recommended companies to use their software over the competitors such
as Sterling Software's GENTRAN package, mainly because it was natively
written for the AS/400 versus a port of mainframe software.

Not so any more.

Regardless of their current software quality, I would never recommend EDI
software from Inovis...

- sjl



Rob wrote:
Yeah, our EDI analyst was assured the upgrade would be a minimal paperwork
processing fee for our upgrade from a 9408-M25-5634 to a 8203-E4A. Now
that we've done it the analyst is finally getting the keys. Now he is
hearing grab your ankles and standby for the amount of the charge.