6. Licensing costs

We have discussed people and hardware issues that affect the upgrade decision, but of course a crucial consideration is the actual cost of the upgrade.

Example

A web design company invested only three years ago in what was then, the latest web design productivity tools.

These included an image editing application, an illustration package, a web page design application.

The licences for each employee ran to £3000 per person. Now the vendor has come out with a new version of the suite which will cost £500 per person. Question: are the additional features this new version offer worth the financial cost of the upgrade?

This is the kind of financial impact that affects the decision to upgrade or not. A company naturally wants to get a good return on their software investment before embarking on yet another round of upgrades.

challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: Purchasing software licenses in volume