August 2, 2013 from Computerworld – “David Steinour is at his wit’s end with enterprise software cost increases. In each of the past three years, the CIO at George Washington University (GWU) watched his annual maintenance and support costs for Oracle Financials and related enterprise software jump by at least 10%.
“Oracle works very well, but at the end of the day we pay a huge price for that service,” Steinour says.
Today, 99% of the fixed-cost increases in the university’s IT budget come from software maintenance price hikes. “That’s just not sustainable,” says Steinour, whose IT department supports 20,000 students and 1,600 faculty members…”
180 View – This problem will eventually undermine the leading ERP vendors who charge their clients a fortune in maintenance each year without providing enough value in return. Customers are between a rock and a hard place. Their systems work by and large but they hate the high costs of maintenance.