What Is the Value Proposition of Support and Maintenance?
P.J. Jakovljevic - April 2, 2007

User enterprises are becoming more aware of how software vendors' support and maintenance (S&M) agreements affect their bottom lines, and many are not particularly pleased with what they see. It might be useful at this point to explain, at a very high level, what S&M fees entitle customers to. From the first high-level group of entitlements comes continuing product development, which provides new product features and functional enhancements, regulatory updates (that is, tax table or restricted party table updates), and "bug" fixes...