Software giant revises 2-year-old Custom Support Agreement.
Companies looking to hold onto support for aging Microsoft software as they plan migrations will now have access to a safety net – but it comes at a price.
Microsoft this week made its first revisions to the 2-year-old Custom Support Agreement program, which lets users purchase support even after a product has surpassed the 10 years of support offered by Microsoft’s product life-cycle program. The program provides mainstream support for five years before fee-based extended support kicks in for an additional five years.
In addition, the customer support program is being expanded to include more kinds of legacy software, including client-side software. Microsoft will use demand as the basis for its decisions about which aging software to add. Today the program covers only Windows NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5, but Microsoft will add Windows XP SP1 when it reaches its end-of-life date, Oct. 10.
Microsoft plans to price support per device – desktop PC or server – and said the starting price for support contracts would probably be in the tens of thousands of dollars for a predetermined minimum number of devices. There is no set price list; support costs will be negotiated with individual companies based on the software and how much of it users have been running.
The Custom Support Agreement program, introduced in December 2004, is designed to prevent users from having to run software that’s unsupported and therefore without available hot fixes for known security vulnerabilities. The extension program also is designed to give users of aging software more flexibility in planning migrations, so they can avoid running unsupported software if migrations get off-schedule or if other issues prevent a timely migration to a new version of software.
“That is a great idea on Microsoft’s part in giving organizations that for some reason are extremely static the opportunity to have some support,” says Nelson Ruest, a consultant and systems integrator with Resolutions Enterprises. Ruest adds, however, that users of old software should just move on. “What is the point of running NT today? There isn’t one,” he says.
“Microsoft is learning that customers have real business requirements that keep them stuck on a particular piece of software long after the rest of the world moves on,” says Al Gillen, an analyst with IDC. “Microsoft can’t strong-arm those customers out of there, and they can’t afford to leave them behind, because some of them are important customers. Microsoft is trying to figure out a way to offer a compromise to these customers.”
Under a custom support agreement, users have phone support, security hot fixes for vulnerabilities the Microsoft Security Response Center lists as critical, the right to request nonsecurity hot fixes for an additional fee, and access to a database of security and nonsecurity hot fixes produced during a product’s mainstream support phase.
“Customers did not like being in panic mode,” says Ines Vargas, director of support policy at Microsoft. “They wanted an opportunity to do their own analysis -a risk analysis, a financial analysis – and figure out how long they should be in a legacy version of software and plan accordingly.”
Microsoft says custom support agreements will be announced a year before a product’s extended support expires.
