VAR money and their added value

[mp3-250]

I have been looking at the invoiced costs from our VAR for some time.

TLDR: we feel paying too much to maintain our sw pdm system.
var is milking us a premium to offer us a sort of preferential hotline which imho should be normal for a rather big customer with 100 licenses.
what kind of service does your var offer to your company?
it is worth the money?

we have 3 type of services invoiced at us and their description is quite generic and I am tempted to cut them all or at least to the bare minimum.

my understanding below.
we have more than 100 licenses including cad, pdm etc.

1. subscription services: allow us solidworks and pdm version up, service packs download and access to the KB and other SW related web services.
A fee is paid per single license every year.
standard and professional licenses are invoiced at the same pricetag, while premium costs a bit more, but we have a couple of them, so we need to cut our license number to be able to save something or ask an additional discount. (they just raised the fee)

2. VAR "premium" and "advanced" assistance for SW and PDM: it seems to allow you to ask as many questions you need without limitations. VAR supply a "specialist" (a person that took a SW support class apparently) that explain you how the software is supposed to work. A hotline by email or phone to be able to contact them by one person in your company.
no multiple person inquiries allowed.
You can submit requests and bugs also. wow

This one is invoiced at about 1 license cost, for both PDM and SW.
I does not seem high, I thought it was included in the previous maintenance fee, but the VAR mafia comes with costs and someone must cover them I suppose...

3. VAR annual special service
This is going to hurt a lot as I discovered the VAR was milking us for something like having a monthly meeting with us, to follow SPRs and other issues we can ask them to test and report back, lookup the KB or ask SW devs for issues we were not able to find a clear answer.

This one is in the range of ten thousands $ per year, and it does not include making software, macros or other tools we may need to fix things that does not work in SW and the PDM admin tools.
Probably the VAR got used to this money since they introduced PDM and apparently "helped" the previous admin to set up a mess of a system. well more problems, more work for them...

I want to cut them out, but I am scared I will be redirected to their over bureaucratic customer service that forces me to file a crazy amount of paper to explain a issue and I must prepare a reproducible data set or they do not even try to inquiry SW at all or do some research for us.

[AlexB]

The only thing we are ever invoiced for is the license support renewal annually. This, as you mentioned, allows us to keep up to date with the latest service packs if desired as well as have access to the subscription-only license features (Solidworks CAM, etc.)

I've never been invoiced for any additional support regardless of the number of calls I make or tickets I open to our VAR. That cost is included in the licensing support renewal.

VARs do offer contract services to do add-ins, migrations, etc. but I haven't had to use them for anything like that in years. It's only ever a one-time cost invoiced separately from the licensing renewals.

Sounds to me like you can cut some invoice line-items from your VAR's "support" or switch VARs altogether to save money.

[jcapriotti]

I'll echo what @AlexB said. We pay the annual maintenance for SolidWorks and PDM licenses, nothing more. We occasionally contact the VAR for support for issues, which mostly ends up with an SPR issued and sometimes they help with a workaround. For PDM these support calls can get a bit in depth in the db to help see what went wrong. To have them fix data would be a service they would quote for, but we have internal resources so its never been needed.

[CarrieIves]

Our VAR has a slightly higher subscription fee that comes with access to SolidProfessor and discounts on special services such as moving PDM to a new server and discounts on training. We can ask as many questions as we want. Even if we were at the standard subscription, I don't think they would care how many questions we ask. There is always some delay between the question asking and the answer. I usually submit tickets by email and get a response in about 30 minutes to an hour. If I call, they usually create a ticket for me that gets a similar time response. I don't usually ask the easy questions.

[mp3-250]

Thank you very much for the feedback.
Similar to @CarrieIves we have a sort of premium support, which entitles us to a personal "assistant" at the VAR that follows us and (more or less) understands our PDM system implementation without explaining it from the beginning every time. They keep a record of our open issues and perform some tests on request for us.

[mp3-250]

I further digged the contract and asked our Japanese VAR.

The subscription service entitles us to:
- solidworks new versions and SPs
- access to the KB

If we want a more detailed Q&A session we must pay two separate subscriptions: one for the cad and one for the pdm side.

it entitles ONE person from our company to 10 (ten) questions per year. They will explain us how to do things in SW based on the user manual, API is not included.

there is a premium version that costs like a single license fee and offers us
- unlimited q&A
- broader support not limited on the user manual (!?)
- limited api support (how to use a single api, but not coding support)

when pressed about the bug ticket system and if it would count towards the 10 questions per year In the default licensing scheme, things got murkier to the point that it will be likely a case by case scenario.

I think it is crazy that a VAR takes all the license money for little to nothing in return and we have to pay a premium to basically report bugs??

I suspect it is more a japanese market thing, and some bad habits of japanese companies as they are used to milk consumers without too much scrutiny with the excuse that unlimited support would be an unacceptable cost. (for them)

[AlexLachance]

I think it is crazy that a VAR takes all the license money for little to nothing in return and we have to pay a premium to basically report bugs??

I suspect it is more a japanese market thing, and some bad habits of japanese companies as they are used to milk consumers without too much scrutiny with the excuse that unlimited support would be an unacceptable cost. (for them)

Without being identical, it's very similar in Canada and I believe in the US also.

[jcapriotti]

I'm not aware of a bug reporting or call/issue limit in the US. We've had VAR support in calls and meetings to help resolve issues. Sometimes these problems could be infrastructure related, hardware, API code errors, user error, or software. The only push back we might get is if the questions are more "how do I do this" in which case they are going to point you to training.

As for bug reporting we get, the VAR system is better than most general software companies that only have a website where you can submit something that ends up who knows where. For VAR/SolidWorks reporting, a live person goes through the issue with you to make sure its really bug and not some other solvable issue like a video driver, etc., then submits it to SolidWorks and get the SPR and attaches your company to it and you can track it. You also have the option to escalate.

Their system could be greatly improved, but have you ever tried submitting a bug/ticket for something like Excel?

[SPerman]

For VAR/SolidWorks reporting, a live person goes through the issue with you to make sure its really bug and not some other solvable issue like a video driver, etc., then submits it to SolidWorks and get the SPR and attaches your company to it and you can track it.

From this point, your var will never mention that SPR again.

[jcapriotti]

From this point, your var will never mention that SPR again.

True, at best you get a notification from SolidWorks that its been implemented. Some 10 years later.....some were fixed along the way but the SPR is still open, and some never.