Have you ever wondered whether your vendor and you share the same feelings about version upgrades? I suspect that in most cases, they don’t.
For many application users, upgrades are welcomed due to a host of exciting new features. If you’re our kind of customer, typically creating industrial applications, upgrades of our imaging libraries are often regarded as a necessary evil. Presumably the current version of our library is doing its job, so why change it - particularly if you have a 2-4 month QA process. Yet you know that if you delay upgrading, at some point operating system changes, Java environment development, or new types of images and documents will cause your product to fail.
Snowbound certainly recognizes these facts of life for B2B application developers. What do we do about it?
Well, we feel it is important to enhance our products to provide you with increasing value by adding new features as determined by our reading of the industry and through customer requests. New annual releases (as well as our monthly Library releases) prove to you that we’re alive and the product is alive, and that your maintenance dollars are well spent. And somewhat selfishly, continuous development makes it harder for competitors to either catch us or to even enter the market.
So should you upgrade at all?
Absolutely! The industry is continually changing and obsoleting old products. Your product will eventually fail if you don’t upgrade its underlying technology. And though you can contract for old versions to be supported, none of us like it. You start getting orphaned products that don’t receive the latest enhancements. We do it if we have to, but it costs us and you, much more.
What Do We Recommend?
Everyone’s busy and you all have demanding release and QA schedules. So we don’t expect you to upgrade on our schedule but you should establish your own upgrade schedule. And it should be based on your vendor’s release cycle. We release upgrades once per year so we urge you to not delay by more than six months. This gives you time to explore the latest improvements and also be in a position to get any special fixes you might need from us without going to extra expense.
-Simon
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