Is this standard business practice?

[davemitch]

We are a small/medium sized manufacturer of highly engineered aerospace products (amongst other systems). We currently use ANSYS as our FEA software package, which we have been doing for the last five or so years. Due to the current economy, we had to forgo the annual maintenance agreement to reduce our costs.

We recently had one of our engineer's machine die on us and needed to install the software on a new system. The ANSYS package requires that we get a software license key from them, and when we contacted them and our reseller, we were told we needed to pay $2,000.00 in administrative fees. They contend that our license agreement says that any change to "the network" requires the payment of an administration fee, while the license agreement states that they must provide us with License Keys and makes no mention of an administration fee in return for the keys.

ANSYS states that it is a "policy" but this is the first we have ever heard of it. There is no mention of it in the license agreement except where it talks about moving a workstation to another network (which we are not doing).
Here are my questions:

1- Given that we have spent of $160k for this software and it's maintenance, is it reasonable to expect that we pay for a license key for a product we have already purchased a license to?

2- Is this "standard" industry practice?

3- Does anyone know of any good alternative products to ANSYS and if there is an existing migration/conversion utility?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. I am not happy about this situation as you could probably appreciate.

Thanks.

 

[swertel]

1) Our ANSYS dealer has been trying to get us to pay that something extra as well, for now reason, but they are putting it on paper as a savings to us. Since you are not changing the network in any way, just doing a single user, I would expect that you would NOT have to pay any administrative fee, especially $2K worth. That's excessive for a license file. EDS gives them away for free when you screw up your original. I guess you have to figure out what their definition of "network" is.

2) I don't know about other FEA software, but this seems to be the ANSYS way. As far as I know about CAD software, I have never come across this. We did have issues when we needed a new license file for our server that worked off of the hardware key. We moved the license server a couple times--back and forth between two servers-- and then finally got our new server which didn't have a parallel port therefore no place to attach the hardware key. Because we screwed around going back and forth before, the CAD company was going to charge us a fee for the license file. Instead of paying, we kept the old server around for a few months just serving licenses until we were REALLY sure of the route we wanted to take. We called the CAD company and got the updated license file without problem.

3) Abaqus is about the only peer to ANSYS. Don't know of any migration. There are others: Algor (sucks), Cosmos/M (dieing), and MSC (going the route of designer/CAD integration and not high end FEA users).

--Scott

For some pleasure reading, the Round Table recommends FAQ731-376