Dear Customers,
A few years back we introduced our Update Subscription program. This approach to licensing was a response to dominant industry trends to move away from periodic Upgrades to ongoing Subscription relationships that deliver continuous value to customers. Our Product Roadmap and Release Strategy are aligned with this philosophy as we strive to make upgrades to new releases much easier. I don’t think that we will ever be perfect here, but we certainly will try.
We have many long-term passionate customers that are used to a certain way of purchasing our products. Therefore we retained the one-off Upgrades SKU (i.e. Purchase Option) for quite some time. Our experience is that customers love plenty of advanced notice to any changes. Many of you let us know this loud and clear, and we appreciate it.
Our goal is to make it easy for everyone to take advantage of the latest features and fixes we’ve developed. Today, most our customers moved to Update Subscription and the Upgrades SKU simply does not make as much sense. It is unnecessarily complex to maintain and we hear from multiple customers that with some of the more aggressive promotions, it makes purchasing decisions confusing. Pretty much all other vendors have discontinued that SKU for similar reasons.
This Quarter (ending on March 31st) will be the last to offer Upgrades. In keeping with our advance notices practice, we want to give plenty of time to customers who for any reason want to use the Upgrades SKU to do so. We ran several Amnesties (i.e. ability to Upgrade from older versions) in the last couple of years, and we will run one more as we retire this SKU. We will continue to offer easy paths to move to higher Editions, as we make both the Enterprise and Architect editions even more attractive for enterprise application development. It is not a huge change, but nevertheless, we want to minimize surprises. If you have been on the fence about Upgrading your old version, now will be a good time and remember that you get your first year of Update Subscription included.
Together, we made great strides in popularizing RAD Studio for Delphi and C++ development. We carefully monitor competitive offerings and we strongly believe that the value customers receive with our products is far superior to the cost. I hope you feel the same way. We are committed to continue investing in our products to make your ROI calculations a “no-brainer”. I am really excited about some of the upcoming releases. Both 10.2.3, this quarter, and the many releases in the quarters to come, will deliver some awesome functionality and quality improvements. 2018 be another year that sees the momentum of Delphi and C++ Builder increase – Go RAD Studio!!!
As always, feel free to reach out to me any time directly. We love hearing from customers who deeply care about our products.
Best,
Atanas