Hi all,
I was just wondering if there were any other government or Academic customers out there who wouldn't mind a discussion about the cancellation of the subscription program and if they managed to get a decent response out of Symantec over the issue.
At our University we only found out this week that the subscription program had been cancelled as we'd previously bought a 3 year renewal and ours is just expiring. It seems it was cancelled last april and no-one had engaged with customers about it.
So the issue is - that I'm sure all other Academic/Government insitutions also had - is that we're now being told that because we have no existing agreement we have to buy a completely new initial purchase at the huge initial cost. We'd only budgeted for our annual renewal and the "new" license cost is going to be astronomical and unaffordable.
I can undertand that we can't just pay maintenance costs on a license agreement that doesn't exist for the new device-count based perpetual license model we need to move to. What I don't understand is why Symantec are not offering to do what has been done in the past for other products. For example when Symantec rebranded Deployment Solution as Ghost solution suite and made Deployment Solution end of life all existing customers had to buy new licenses in exactly the same way. What they did however was offer existing customers massively discounted pricing on the initial license purchases in-line with their expected renewal.
The approach mentioned above isn't only reasonable but also damage limitation. There's no better way to make sure no-one wants to buy any more of your products ever again than to force your customers to rebuy the same products again for no reason at the massive initial purchase cost - when they still have the licensed product in place.
I was wondering if anyone had any success in negotiating such a discount on their "new" license purchase after their Academic/government subscription ended? If so please do let me know! Or if alternatively you're a customer who experience the same issues but just had to rebuy anyway I'd appreciate a quick chat.
Our attempts are falling on deaf ears and it's beginning to look like we'll have to rush through an emergency tender process to move to a new product. We're all pretty apalled at how loyal customers are being treated especially in these sectors whilst everyone is being squeezed - this couldn't come at a worse time.
Thanks for your time and feel free to privately message me so we can keep any further detail off the forums.
Best Regards,
Laurence