VAR money and their added value

[mp3-250]

I have been looking at the invoiced costs from our VAR for some time.

TLDR: we feel paying too much to maintain our sw pdm system.
var is milking us a premium to offer us a sort of preferential hotline which imho should be normal for a rather big customer with 100 licenses.
what kind of service does your var offer to your company?
it is worth the money?

we have 3 type of services invoiced at us and their description is quite generic and I am tempted to cut them all or at least to the bare minimum.

my understanding below.
we have more than 100 licenses including cad, pdm etc.

1. subscription services: allow us solidworks and pdm version up, service packs download and access to the KB and other SW related web services.
A fee is paid per single license every year.
standard and professional licenses are invoiced at the same pricetag, while premium costs a bit more, but we have a couple of them, so we need to cut our license number to be able to save something or ask an additional discount. (they just raised the fee)

2. VAR "premium" and "advanced" assistance for SW and PDM: it seems to allow you to ask as many questions you need without limitations. VAR supply a "specialist" (a person that took a SW support class apparently) that explain you how the software is supposed to work. A hotline by email or phone to be able to contact them by one person in your company.
no multiple person inquiries allowed.
You can submit requests and bugs also. wow

This one is invoiced at about 1 license cost, for both PDM and SW.
I does not seem high, I thought it was included in the previous maintenance fee, but the VAR mafia comes with costs and someone must cover them I suppose...

3. VAR annual special service
This is going to hurt a lot as I discovered the VAR was milking us for something like having a monthly meeting with us, to follow SPRs and other issues we can ask them to test and report back, lookup the KB or ask SW devs for issues we were not able to find a clear answer.

This one is in the range of ten thousands $ per year, and it does not include making software, macros or other tools we may need to fix things that does not work in SW and the PDM admin tools.
Probably the VAR got used to this money since they introduced PDM and apparently "helped" the previous admin to set up a mess of a system. well more problems, more work for them...

I want to cut them out, but I am scared I will be redirected to their over bureaucratic customer service that forces me to file a crazy amount of paper to explain a issue and I must prepare a reproducible data set or they do not even try to inquiry SW at all or do some research for us.

[AlexB]

The only thing we are ever invoiced for is the license support renewal annually. This, as you mentioned, allows us to keep up to date with the latest service packs if desired as well as have access to the subscription-only license features (Solidworks CAM, etc.)

I've never been invoiced for any additional support regardless of the number of calls I make or tickets I open to our VAR. That cost is included in the licensing support renewal.

VARs do offer contract services to do add-ins, migrations, etc. but I haven't had to use them for anything like that in years. It's only ever a one-time cost invoiced separately from the licensing renewals.

Sounds to me like you can cut some invoice line-items from your VAR's "support" or switch VARs altogether to save money.

[jcapriotti]

I'll echo what @AlexB said. We pay the annual maintenance for SolidWorks and PDM licenses, nothing more. We occasionally contact the VAR for support for issues, which mostly ends up with an SPR issued and sometimes they help with a workaround. For PDM these support calls can get a bit in depth in the db to help see what went wrong. To have them fix data would be a service they would quote for, but we have internal resources so its never been needed.

[CarrieIves]

Our VAR has a slightly higher subscription fee that comes with access to SolidProfessor and discounts on special services such as moving PDM to a new server and discounts on training. We can ask as many questions as we want. Even if we were at the standard subscription, I don't think they would care how many questions we ask. There is always some delay between the question asking and the answer. I usually submit tickets by email and get a response in about 30 minutes to an hour. If I call, they usually create a ticket for me that gets a similar time response. I don't usually ask the easy questions.

[mp3-250]

Thank you very much for the feedback.
Similar to @CarrieIves we have a sort of premium support, which entitles us to a personal "assistant" at the VAR that follows us and (more or less) understands our PDM system implementation without explaining it from the beginning every time. They keep a record of our open issues and perform some tests on request for us.