Although Microsoft last month offered users what appeared to be an olive branch by extending fee-based custom support for NT through 2006, the service’s flat-rate pricing instead reinforces to many a curt message: Get off NT.
Although Microsoft last month offered users what appeared to be an olive branch by extending fee-based custom support for NT through 2006, the service’s flat-rate pricing instead reinforces to many a curt message: Get off NT.
Some users have reported price quotes on custom support for NT as high as $250,000 for six months. Microsoft didn’t disclose its flat-fee pricing when it extended the custom support program.
“I thought the quote Microsoft gave us was quite insane,” says a network executive, who asked not to be identified. He was looking to support a small number of NT servers and workstations, but gagged on the $250,000 price tag. “It seemed like Microsoft was offering some hope, but not really.”
Analysts say the reality is that NT, first introduced in 1996, is dead even though Gartner estimates that more than 10% of installed desktops in large companies and up to 20% of installed Windows servers still are running it.
“The pricing is kind of an incentive to upgrade isn’t it?” says Jeff Allred, manager of network services at the Duke University Cancer Center. Allred, who is down to one cluster of NT servers and plans to replace with Windows 2003 within six months, says he is glad he has staff in-house to support NT.
According to Gartner analyst Tom Bittman, Microsoft does not publish support prices because they are part of custom deals and negotiating points with those who plan to migrate.
“Microsoft is not motivated to help unless you plan to migrate, because there is not a lot of money to be made in support of NT,” Bittman says. He adds custom support is particularly unfriendly to any company with just a few NT boxes because support is priced per company, which means a company with five NT servers pays the same price as one with 1,000.
Support for NT, which had been extended previously, was slated to expire Jan. 1, 2005. A December report by Gartner said custom support for NT workstations and servers traditionally has been $200,000 per year. With the offer made in December, Microsoft said customers could sign up for contracts that ran only three months to control costs and provide flexibility for those close to completing migrations.
“This is a custom piece of support, so you are going to pay through the nose for it,” says Laura DiDio, an analyst with The Yankee Group. “Support is going to become much more expensive if you stay on these old systems.”
The situation that NT holdouts find themselves in appears to be a result of evolution.
“It used to be quite common for users to load up an app and it just ran and ran,” says Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata. Those “functional” set-ups have become obsolete with pervasive computing, he says. “Now a system has to be secure as well as functional, and that is a whole different dynamic. That means it is not OK to run an [operating system] that is not supported any longer. NT 4 is in that category, functional but not supported.”
