Well Lookie Here, Barracuda Networks tries to get me to fall into their trap again...

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Well look what was in my in-box this morning! Looks like Barracuda Networks is sending
out spam again. Maybe word is getting around about their less that value-full renewal policy. Could it be that people are starting to resent being taken advantage of??

See my response below their message. Seems like they don't remember that I was a fish
they already hooked and fleeced.

--- SPAM from Barracuda ----

Howdy,

Just following up with you about a project you were working on with Barracuda Networks.

Checking in to see how things are going for you. Have you had network changes recently or a issue pop up that we can help solve?

Let me know if you would like a solution guide for reference.

Happy December,

--- Message sent in response to the sales droid message from Barracuda ---

Hi Jaz,

No, things are about the same. I see by your website that you haven't changed a bit
and continue to think that it is an honest business practice to charge people for a service
and then not to deliver it.

When I renew my Barracuda Engergize subscription, THE RENEWAL SHOULD BE FROM THE DATE THAT I RENEW, NOT THE ANNIVERSARY DATE!

Many small businesses have cash flow challenges and cannot renew their subscription right at the expirartion date. Where does that leave them? If they have to delay their renewal by three or
four months, they then get greeted by your company charging them for an entire year of service
when they only actually get 8 or 9 months, since the renewal goes from the anniversary date instead of the anniversary date being reset to the actual date of renewal.

As it stands right now, If we were to renew our Energize subscription, We'd have to pay for FIVE
YEARS of service but would only get THREE years. If that isn't a rip-off, I don't know what is.

I think this is dishonest business practice. I will no longer give money to what I view as a crooked company such as yours.

I have posted about this corrupt practice on my blog (http://www.john-palmer.net/wordpress/?p=46) and
on facebook. Think I'll "bump" each of those postings to refresh them in the search engines so that
people continue to be informed of this practice so that they won't fall into the trap of doing business
with your company as we did.

Perhaps for your collective New Year's resolution at Barracuda Networks, you can all resolve to operate your business in an honest fashion and provide FAIR value with FAIR business practices
in 2012, both of which, in my opinion, you are severly lacking.

Maybe then, PERHAPS, we may look at doing further business with you.

2

[rest of rant snipped]

This has nothing to do with NANOG and is standard practice in the
software industry anyway.

3

In fact, it's not. If you miss your renewal payment for, frex, Safari books,
they actually slip your cycle date to when you renew -- since you don't *get*
the service between the expire date and the renew date, I concur with his
appraisal that you shouldn't be paying for it, either.

If in fact, the service *kept working* for a short time when an overlooked payment was missed, it would be a different story.

But, effectively, he's a new client, and should probably be treated that way.
Assuming the paid service is actually *the update service*.

I also disagree with your proposition that this is off-topic for NANOG,
really.

Cheers,
-- jra

4

In fact, it's not. If you miss your renewal payment for, frex, Safari
books,
they actually slip your cycle date to when you renew -- since you don't
*get*
the service between the expire date and the renew date, I concur with
his
appraisal that you shouldn't be paying for it, either.

If in fact, the service *kept working* for a short time when an
overlooked payment was missed, it would be a different story.

But, effectively, he's a new client, and should probably be treated
that way.
Assuming the paid service is actually *the update service*.

I also disagree with your proposition that this is off-topic for NANOG,
really.

I've always strongly felt that this was a rather foul business practice, wherever I've seen it. The justification for it is the utterly misguided belief that, if allowed to, customers will pay for a month then cancel their subscription and 'coast' on the 'current' version of the signature for a year. This approach suffers from (at least) two fundamental flaws:

1) The entire customer base are treated as hostile. It is no surprise that they resent this. (Assumption: having resentful customers is bad)
2) Spam is, perhaps moreso than ever, a rapidly evolving threat. The effectiveness of signatures declines dramatically with time, which means that August's signatures have little value by December. [By the way, it seems to me that if they're willing to charge for valueless signatures, that represents either A) doubt as to the value of the current signatures, or B) disbelief in the decreasing value of out of date signatures.]

While I realize that car insurance might not be the best analogy subject, imagine if you put your car on blocks, went off to college and allowed the insurance to lapse whilst you were there. When you return, the insurance company wants you to pay the last three years of insurance in order to reactivate your policy. That companies customers would react in the same way: they would find a new provider to do business with, rather than pay out for a valueless bit of smoke and mirrors.

Nathan Eisenberg

5

Exactly. And when you consider the fact that most anyone can roll their own
solution with Postfix, Postgrey, a few RBLs, and Spamassassin that works
just as well - if not better than a Barracuda, trying to justify back
charging is even more unbelievable.

6

Are you turning your anti-spam appliance off whilst choosing not to pay for the maintenance? If not, then I'd argue that a better analogy would be that you don't pay for your car insurance but continue to drive your car around until you have an accident, at which point you try to take out a new policy so that you are covered.

Whilst I can see the argument for the likes of signature updates, where you aren't receiving the service in the period that you haven't paid for (unless the signature update system is seriously broken), these kind of maintenance renewals for appliances normally also include software support and hardware repair/replacement.

If the companies don't backdate the maintenance renewal, then you would end up with lots of companies only purchasing the maintenance on an ad-hoc basis and that will just make the renewals more expensive for those of us that actually pay attention to when our subscriptions to due to expire and how much they will cost to renew in order accurately predict cash flow.

Edward Dore
Freethought Internet

7

<rant>
Besides, treating your customers like thieves and/or forcing disagreeable conditions on them is all the rage now! Everyone knows they can screw customers as hard as they like because everyone else is going to screw them just as hard, and if you aren't screwing them hard enough, well that's just wasted potential right there! Don't worry about them leaving for another provider - They all do it! I mean, look at the airlines: Company profits in the toilet, customer satisfaction so low they're trying to get Congress involved, crew pay at the lowest on record, and the salaries of the upper management is the highest in the history of the industry! Just think, if you screw your customers hard enough, YOU could be NEXT sitting on that huge pile of cash in the top of your ivory tower pissing down on the public!

For example, I have a large pile of content that I have paid for but cannot access anymore because their various copy protection schemes are no longer supported or no longer run on modern machines. Next to that I have a smaller but increasingly growing stack of content I paid for but REFUSE to access due to provisions hidden in the EULA requiring me to display advertisements and/or install spyware on my computer. You can't read the EULA before purchase and you can't return the purchase for a refund if you refuse the EULA. (That's right, you can sell AD-SUPPORTED software that customers pay FULL RETAIL PRICE for! They whine and complain on the internet, but believe you me, when the next iteration comes out, they'll line up to buy it!) I could resort to illegal hacks that disable the DRM or remove the ads, but that is a federal offense and a security risk, and I don't feel like wasting my computer or career over a few hundred dollars. So they join the pile. The companies who do this actually consider this situation desirable - They got my money, and I'm not going to be downloading patches or using up server time or anything. Pure profit! It's win-win!

Executive Summary: It doesn't matter what your customers want anymore. You just give them what you want to give them, and if they don't take it, you punish them until they give up and go away (and don't worry about that, they'll be back!) or accept your conditions. Thar's gold in them thar hills, you just gotta go beat it out of em!
</rant>

8

In my position within the enterprise vertical, backdating to the
expiration (not the payment date) seems to be the norm. Cisco does
this on SmartNet, as does SolarWinds and a number of other vendors
I've worked with. We don't typically slip on the dates intentionally,
but our procurement and legal groups have a habit of fighting over
wording on the contracts.

David.

9

Having worked in the past at a shop that sold managed support agreements
for software we sold - the overhead for staffing and code and
blacklisting type data sets are spread out in the yearly support
agreement. A lapsed customer has not funded the delta changes in code
and data set from lapsed data to renewal date, but will get to take
advantage of the work.
While a new customer also will not fund these on a new starting
contract, that is normally considered some cost of acquiring new
business.

Now in some cases on the other end of the transaction I've found it
cheaper to buy 'new' then it was to 'true up' the support. I haven't
found a vendor that wouldn't go that route, even if it involved getting
some escalation on the sales side first. At that point it's the cost
of customer retention vs new business that the vendor needs to worry
about. However if you are happy with the product, and the renewal
isn't more then 'new' purchases - we all shouldn't be baulking having to
'true up' contracts.

10

This particular product is often used by the SMB types. This changes
things a bit. While I disagree with paying for signature updates you
didn't use (It's a service, and I don't care about their fixed costs, I
went into it knowing I'd have a license for the signatures as they were
expired), I do understand where they are coming from for software/firmware
development. Unfortunately, they don't decouple the two.

However, this particular vendor is bad in a market where gear often passes
hands or goes lapsed for years. After a certain point (IE: 1 yr), you
shouldn't have to true-up. This particular company makes your 3-year
lapsed appliance pay for 3 years of missed updates, at which point you
might as well just throw it in the garbage.

Same thing with my license plates -- if they go for 11 months or less, I
have to "true up". If I put a car in storage for over a year, I can
purchase a new registration.

11

In a message written on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:26:56PM -0600, PC wrote:

This particular product is often used by the SMB types. This changes
things a bit. While I disagree with paying for signature updates you
didn't use (It's a service, and I don't care about their fixed costs, I
went into it knowing I'd have a license for the signatures as they were
expired), I do understand where they are coming from for software/firmware
development. Unfortunately, they don't decouple the two.

Maybe I'm just a grinch, but I think they could fix this problem.
If they set the software in the box so that on the day your
subscription expires it no longer processes the subscription data
there would be a lot less issue.

The problem here is they let the system use the old signature data,
and that data is useful for a while. The day after a contract
expires, you're still getting 99.9% of th benefit, a week later
95%, and so on.

They've essentially been too nice in letting the software be leniant
with the signature data, and they they pay for it in terms of
customer relations when they try to do renew. Do they let customers
renew every 13 months, effectively getting one month free each year
while they run on old subscription data, or do they play hardball and
make them "true up" with a backdated contract. It's really a no-win
choice for them.

I suspect if someone came in here saying "my Baracuda stopped
filtering out spam the day my contract expired" there would be no
love for that person, they would be told "yeah, so renew your
contract if you want the service to work". While making it stop
working may seem less customer friendly, I think it actually ends
up more. Everyone knows where they stand, and the poor engineer
trying to get his management to renew it now has a nice club to use
internally rather than the current "nothing happens if we ignore
it, at least in the short term."

12

At that point why should they sell iron at all? Seems like you get
all of the downside of owning the iron, and all of the downside of
paying for a cloud based service. Either you own what you own,
or you pay for service that somebody else provides. This "you
bought useless hardware unless you pay up" is really what's
infuriating.

Mike

13

In a message written on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 10:54:55AM -0800, Michael Thomas wrote:

At that point why should they sell iron at all? Seems like you get
all of the downside of owning the iron, and all of the downside of
paying for a cloud based service. Either you own what you own,
or you pay for service that somebody else provides. This "you
bought useless hardware unless you pay up" is really what's
infuriating.

I didn't say the box should stop working, but that it should stop
processing the subscription data. For instance Barracuda boxes do
local bayesian filtering, which does not require a subscription,
and should continue to work.

But I'm also not sure why this is any more or less infuriating than
other things in the real world. When my home was built I had to
buy an electric meter, at my cost, so I could get electric _service_.
If I don't pay the bill they turn me off, that hardware is now
useless and I don't get to recoup that cost.

Barracuda has bundled a hardware product with a service. Some people
want it priced like a hardware product, some people want it priced like
a service. That is fundamentally why they are in a no-win position from
a customer relations perspective.

14

Presumably, Barracuda's hardware is i386/i686 compatible commodity parts. It's probably not at all "useless". Just attach a USB DVD drive or USB flash drive, wipe the disk(s) and install your favorite Linux distro.
It may take some doing to get all/most of the features Barracuda provides setup on your own...but if you don't have the time/expertise to do it, that's why companies like Barracuda exist.

15

If the spam filter stop working, it's presumably a pretty useless thing
as a... spam filtering device which is presumably why most people are
buying barracuda boxen. I suppose my larger point is that this is why
companies like postini exist. At least there you know that if you don't
pay the bill, mail stops flowing altogether much like any other service.
It's this "I paid for the hardware, but I don't really own what I paid for"
state that seems to stick in people's craw. Or maybe if they just leased
the box it would be more clear what their business model was.

Mike

16

The hardware Barracuda charges you a very pretty penny for is very low end.
$3000 or so that they charge for a mid-level spam filters gets you a single
power supply, single hard disk, and a low end processor.

According to their site it does appear they offer the product as VM image.
This would eliminate the stupid hardware markup and their attempt at
backdating updates.

17

The vmware image is more expensive than the midrange hardware. (and you pay for how many processors it will use, ram, features like multi domain support, etc...)

18

Leveraging a superior bargaining position to achieve more revenue from a
kind of high-risk customer doesn't sound "dishonest".... it sounds
rational.
Why would an agreement be denominated as "1 year maintenance" if it could
simply be reinstated at will?

What is meant by high-risk, is a customer inclined to renew maintenance,
only at the moment that a lot of services are to be required all at once --
for example, just before a major software upgrade, likely followed by a
slew of support incidents, possibly at a cost to the software vendor
above the fee.

I guess the networking equivalent is --- you stop paying for your OC3
with $BIG_TELCO for a few months, and you get it turned off, but for
some reason the physical cabling isn't physically removed. A few months
later, you decide you need an OC3 again and exclaim the unfairness of
$BIG_TELCO informing you that a fee is required to re-install the OC3
they haven't removed yet.
How unfair right... many thousands of $$ just to flip a switch? One
chose to go without service for a few months, therefore should get a lower
total cost, based on the new renewal date, right?

In fact, it's not. If you miss your renewal payment for, frex, Safari

books,
they actually slip your cycle date to when you renew -- since you don't
*get*

It's a standard practice for _Software_ _Maintenance_ agreements; where a
product is purchased, with an annual charge for updates, support,
sometimes warranty, and other services for that product.

If you let the agreement lapse, usually no warranty. Most extended
warranties can't be renewed 6 months after they lapsed, because you found
the product just broke and you would like to renew a warranty, so you can
RMA it for a repair/replacement.

Safari books is not a software maintenance agreement; it's a subscription
service, and they allow members of the public to start a subscription any
time, the cost to renew's basically equivalent to the cost to sign up;
it's not as if there is a higher price for new subs.

But, effectively, he's a new client, and should probably be treated that

way.

Yes. Software maintenance / subscription update services are not usually
sold to just anyone on the street; they are normally sold with software.

If you allowed your maintenance agreement to lapse, then You may now be in
a position to negotiate a new agreement, but this most likely consists
of asking what costs/terms are available for re-upping the maintenance,
and having to accept in order to re-up.

This likely means one of these scenarios...
1 o One time upgrade fee
2 o Pay delinquent maintenance bills, and then renew from anniversary
date.
3 o Have to re-purchase product at brand new product cost, no 'upgrade'
discount, since maintenance lapsed.

(1) and (2) are most popular ways vendors offer to redeem expired
maintenance.

(3) Is not dishonest. It is the simplest thing to do, and justifiable if
the product's price is low.

One-time upgrade fee is very common with consumer software. When you buy
"Windows 95" retail, you don't even pay an annual maintenance for free
lifetime upgrades.

Chances are you buy each upgrade, or get forced into (3), since Windows'
cost is basically built into each new computer nowadays.

But imagine if no computers came with windows.. and Microsoft offered you
$25 a year for annual maintenance, for your Windows '95, and issued a new
release every 2 years.

If you allowed your maintenance to lapse in 1995, and then decided to renew
in 2011...
do you really think a reasonable software vendor would give you the 1 year
windows '95 maintenance
re-activation for $25 and the free upgrade to Windows 7?

Nope... chances are you'd to pay $150+ before the vendor would consider
re-upping that.

19

Well, I strongly suspect that's a bad analogy: the thing they'd be collecting
for would be *the three months of unpaid bills on the circuit*. Possibly plus
a deposit to make sure you don't screw them again. But they might well not
charge you a new installation charge; I don't know that there's an industry
standard practice there, nor that we'd know about if it there was (people
who do that aren't much talking about it).

And, finally, I suspect that on a circuit the size of an OC-3, you'd be lucky
to get to be 30 days late on the payment; "a few" is generally between 3 and 5.

But in fact, while you'd be on the hook for the "few months" they let it run
while you weren't paying, you would almost certainly *not* owe them for the
"few months" after they shut it off, since they weren't providing you the
service then.

Cheers,
-- jra

20

Actually, the unit still works as an e-mail filter. You can still access the Barracuda "reputation" list with it
and it does SPF and Baysian filtering still. It also lets you configure black lists and other RBLs as well, so
it still has utility. The thing that you don't get is updated SPAM and virus defs as well as updated software
for the machine.

Someone mentioned the fact that if the hardware is still working, then the renewal policy is reasonable since
the machine still works. May I remind that person that Barracuda charges you for the hardware AND also
the subscriptions to the spam and virus defs.

If they provided the hardware for free, then I would agree with him about the renewal policy, but its NOT free.