SA Mainteance

[heathersue]

Hi All,

We had SSU and now SA mainteance for our systems. I'm hearing from an Avaya BP that this is only good for upgrades within the same version (so like version 6.3 to 6.4 to g.5...etc) But that once you go to 7, you pay for the software upgrade... Is this true? Since Avaya skips releases then how would this benefit anyone? Please advise what you've experienced. Thanks!

 

[kyle555]

That's right. As far as I know, they only sell upgrade advantage now - UA and not support advantage - SA - so you're always entitled to new release upgrades.

And they find a way to fiddle around with the licensing so a "core" user includes stuff in Release 8 that it didn't in release 7, so even if you had upgrade advantage, it's never free an there's always an uplift of $10/user or whatever it is to enable your R7 core user to be an R8 user.

Avaya doesn't really skip major releases. We're at 8 now and there was 3,4,5,6,7 before.

To me it makes sense. It's not like the old days when a major release lasted for a long time. There's so many moving parts to the architecture and so many changes to technology standards like SIP or Chrome or Firefox that you can't just keep your stuff for 10 years in a vacuum with parts maintenance and keep on truckin'. Everyone would complain when they decided that instead of calling it 8.1 Service Pack 4 that it was 9.0 just to squeeze Support Advantage customers.

It'll be a pricey uplift, but the new way is 'pay for support, be allowed to keep using our newest stuff'. Makes life a lot easier.

 

[jimbojimbo]

Avaya has changed the maintenance requirements since R6. Starting in R7 SA and UA were included as separate line items but they mandated you have both. In version 8 this goes away and you just have maintenance which includes both SA and UA.

Licensing has changed. In version 5 you had either Enterprise or Standard edition licensing. In 6.x Avaya added "Suite" licensing which included 3 license tiers - Foundation, Mobility, and Collaboration. Now the Suite has Core and Power users licensing.

If you have been on SA with UA and have not wanted to "uplift" your existing licensing you could remain on the previous license model. Of course you didn't get the new features.

Uplifting from Standard, Enterprise, or Foundation to Core has an "uplift" fee. Upgrading from Mobility to Core would be a no cost. Power is basically for use of Equinox Conferencing so uplifting to Power will most likely be very limited. Of course this assumes you have an active maintenance contract.

 

[heathersue]

Thanks to both of you. I'm bummed that SA (which I thought was going to help me with cost of upgrades) doesnt do very much. I'm going from 6.3 to 8. Seems like prem telephony solutions are going to be very pricey if we have to basically keep rebuying them every couple years

Cheers!

 

[kyle555]

Talk to a partner and look into your options.

They're all going the way of pay per month/pay regularly rather than drop big bag of cash once every 5-10 years.

There are options!

 

[avayaguy23]

Just an FYI that Avaya will try to overcharge you for UA. For instance, we purchased AAM 6 maintstream licenses years ago via a la carte. We never put UA on them. We want to upgrade to AAM 7 which now avaya forces you to put UA on it. It is actually cheaper to pay the upgrade fee from 6 to 7 than to have UA. UA costs about 4 times as much on a YEARLY basis. Avaya does a major release every 3-5 years so they are screwing the customer over. You should fight avaya on UA costs.