Don't Bet Your Business on Commercial MTAs

The Only Constant is Change

Every time you install a commercially licensed piece of software you take a risk.

Why?

Because ending the relationship with your vendor means ending the use of that key piece of infrastructure, which means licensing a replacement solution, migrating your systems to the new solution, and paying for both solutions during the transition.

And the reasons for ending that relationship are numerous:

• When the vendor is bought by investors or Private Equity looking to maximize the return on their new investment, it always means raising prices and cutting costs.
• The vendor may get caught up in feature-creep, adding new marketecture that you don't need but which you're required to pay extra for going forward.
• The vendor could go out of business or abandon their product in favor of something their new leadership finds more lucrative, leaving you with abandonware at best.
• It could even be as simple as the vendor being unreliable in issuing new license keys, leading to outages that have you scrambling to get the vendor on the line to issue a renewed key.

Even if you trust the team you're dealing with now, there's absolutely no guarantee you'll be dealing with the same team come renewal time. You may find yourself with no choice but to accept the changes the new team brings or risk losing use of critical business infrastructure.