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.