We've done some customer work with cimcloud over the past 5 years. Their current platform is substantially more open and customer-friendly than their original system which was clearly stuck in the past, designed to only changed by a professional services team. While cimcloud has made significant progress in the past couple of years, professional services profit appears to still be a major center for them. IMO, they bungled their policies and messaging for legacy customers to move to the new platform. I'm quite sure Wayne's customer is not alone.
(Their new platform is quite a bit more open, letting customers do more of their own work. But they still quote projects in a range of hours, with no guarantees -- even though it is work done on THEIR system with a website that THEY installed and manage. Talk about slaves to the timesheet ...)
That said, customers always have the option to consider moving to another solution when their current vendor seems to be too expensive or unresponsive. Especially in a fast-changing area like e-commerce, we should encourage our customers to do this. For example, integrating Magento to Sage 100 is now a quite viable solution; however, the resulting functionality set is different from cimcloud's so if you rely on these cimcloud features, now you know why you might be paying a premium.
This is yet another reason why we actively market our expertise to our customers to both manage their relationships with vendors like cimcloud and help them sort through their options to either add new functionality into their system or change vendors for an existing one. If we'd done this for a customer similar to Wayne's, at the very least the customer would know what they get compared to alternatives; the "overpaying" paying part is always in the eye of the beholder, but they'd at least have some numbers to compare.
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Jerry Norman
At-Large BOD Member, 90 Minds
Smartbridge Partners
512.419.1444 x112
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-29-2021 07:55
From: Wayne Schulz
Subject: CIM Cloud Migration Cost
I don't know about the upgrade costs but I have a customer who is white hot over what they say is an exorbitant price to get them from an "older" CIMcloud platform to their latest.
Almost every planning conversation I have with this customer includes some type of rant about how CIMcloud unreasonably imposed an upgrade fee to get them to a new platform only a few years after CIMcloud implemented the current one.
I admit I don't fully know what the issue is or what the old/new platform is ( that's CIMclouds job to manage ). I just know I try hard to not be in the middle of these contests and for some reason it happened here.
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Wayne Schulz - Schulz Consulting - 860-516-8990
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