Forum Discussion

TimC2's avatar
TimC2
Level 2
3 years ago

Simplifying licencing and usability

Veritas System Recovery is a great tool, but it has a couple of frustrating limitations, they are :

1. Actually trying to buy a licence is far too difficult. Many deployments of System Recovery, Desktop Edition will be to end users or small businesses that want a couple of licences at most. This normally results in a call to a distributor that isn't too fussed as its low cost and one-off sales and the time to get a licence is around 1-2 weeks. There is no direct purchase option like we can do with virtually all other on-line vendors. Nobody expects in 2022 for it to be difficult to buy a licence.  The licence key entry box even offers a "Purchase one today at the Veritas Global Store" link, but this just dumps you on the support pages with no way to actually buy a licence.

2. When you've actually got a licence, its difficult to renew the support, since its all locked away in the my.veritas portal. What's wrong with sending customers an email with a link that allows them to buy more maintenance ?  Currently licences expire and its easier to buy a whole new licence than just to renew.

Neither of the above will impact resellers, but it will make life easier for customers and get Veritas more sales and rewewals. 

3. There are several places where the software is really inconsistent - the progress and performance pane as a good example. Its a modal dialogue box when it opens during a "run or manage backups", process, but its not if you open it from vProTray. The impact is that you have to close the initial one, close the UI to get the desktop real estate back, then re-open the tray one to see whats going on. This is all wasted effort, why can't it open a window that is not modal and save us all some keypresses, or let us decide if we want to see progress and performance.

4. If you are quick going into the UI after bootup, then under tasks, run and manage backups, there are no jobs and it offers to set up a new backup policy, but if you wait a bit and close it, it finds the previous policies. The UI should at least be consistent - its either configured, or its not.

Is this the right place to get these suggestions back to product engineering ?

  • Hello

    Thank you for taking the time to let us know your thoughts and I agree that they are all valid points.

    For the Licensing and Renewal items 1 & 2, there are already investigations underway on how best to improve this, for various products. I would ask that you bear with us, as it is hoped to start implementing improvements in the course of this year.

    As to the VSR Product related items 3 & 4, I will bring item 3 to the Development teams notice, to see if there are any improvements that can be made. For item 4, as you say, that sounds like a timing condition, where the VSR console is available to be opened, but the configuration has not been fully read yet, so is not populated.  Again I can discuss this with Development team, to see if there is something that can be improved.

     

    Maybe you would also be interested in signing up for the Veritas Customer and Partner Engagement Program (CPEP), where you would be able to take part in product demos and pass on comments\suggestions\improvements such as these, with a more direct channel to the Engineering and Development teams. If so, please review https://vox.veritas.com/t5/CPEP/ct-p/CPEP .

     

    • Tonypdean's avatar
      Tonypdean
      Level 2

      I totally agree with TimC2 regarding difficulty in purchasing licences. I am trying to upgrade from SR 2013R2 to version 22 but I cannot see how this can be done or even how to buy a single desktop licence for domestic use. I can download a trial version of the software but what good is that when I cant get a license?

      Having used SR for many years, I am disappointed to the point of considering ditching it altogether and using Windows backup!

  • OK, so an update. It's taken me 33 days of constant pestering a Veritas Platinum reseller in the UK to get the right quote for "at least 3 more years of support". This has taken more than 7 people (that I know of) and only today have I received the second part of the maintenance, the first to get me back on maintenance and give me the remainder of that contract, since there has been a gap due to me not receiving a licence expiring email. The second licence gives me 3 more years of support, so that I don't have to go through all this pain for 4 years. I hope once again that this will be fixed by then, but inside know that it probably won't be.

    I've probably sent 40 emails and made around 20 phone calls all for a total order value of less than $100, so this is a completely crazy waste of everyone's time.

    Conversely, I can buy products on-line and get next day delivery for physical stuff via Amazon, eBay and many more. I can order food for home delivery in less than an hour, the mainstream supermarkets will deliver my weekly shop each week for an order closed the previous evening. Even most shipments from China take less than a month to arrive. Microsoft, Apple and many more can do on-line purchasing of products, licences and updates, so why is Veritas stuck in the 1970's with its large corporate via reseller only delivery method ?

    The Veritas software is all on-line and licences are electronic, so the licence payment and generation should be instantaneous. For home grade products, the need to add a licence to a my.veritas.com account also needs to be automated, again removing another unnecessary delay and related complexity.  

     

    To help others that might want to get a licence, the current process outlines as follows 

    1. Go to https://www.veritas.com/en/uk/partners, scroll down and click "find a partner". Choose your country and hit search. Select one of the results and click the link

    2. Try and locate some contact details on the 3rd parties web site, then give them a call, since the product you need is probably not listed on their web site (and definitely won't be for maintenance renewals).

    3. Try and get a quote, the reseller will realise that you don't have an account, so request one and likely fail since you are not a massive company with high revenue stream opportunities. Potentially get rejected and have to go back to (2) and try again with someone else.

    4. Get the reseller to raise a quote for the product, currently its called "System Recovery Desktop Edition" (for Windows). If you want Linux Desktop, then you get pulled down the Server route and end up with an expensive licence that around 10 times more expensive than the Windows desktop route, so don't fall for that trap. 

    5. Wait several days for the reseller / veritas process to generate the quote.. all the time, your evaluation period is expiring ...

    6. Once you are half confident that it might be the correct product, place the order, this is likely to be prepayment only, so try for a credit card payment over the phone or head off into online banking to set up the reseller and make the payment.

    7. Return to the seller to get them to confirm that they have received the payment, wait for this to happen.

    8. Wait for reseller to place the order with Vertias

    9. After a couple more days, you get the shiny licence certificate PDF in your mailbox. 

    10. Nothing in the certificate will tell you what to do next, but you need to head off to my.veritas.com and generate a login / use the login related to the email address you provided already. Wait for the account activation before you can log in.

    11. Figure out how to redeem the entitlement to actually get access to the product, probably requires a Veritas support ticket if you've not done this before as its not obvious.

    12. Download the product - figuring out which of the multiple files you might need for your version - is it the multilingual one or not ? How do the patches relate to the different downloads ? Figure that out too.

    13. Generate a licence key and save it. Install licence key into the product.

    14. Create recovery media, so that you can actually recover the backups when you need to.

    Finally, success on such a simple process !

    So, a question to Veritas, which is more likely - customers prefer the Amazon type of purchasing experience that they are very used to, or would they prefer the dogs dinner of an obstacle course that Veritas makes people jump through.

    How much of a cut does the reseller make in the licence that's say $60 for a one-off order with low likelihood of repeat business ?

    How much hassle does the customer have to endure to get a simple licence key ?

    Does Veritas really want to sell products to end customers or not ?

    Someone needs to take a long hard look at the customer experience here and take the current process out back and put it quietly out to pasture.