More fun from the front lines of MegaCorp. Way back, when we ran our Oracle system here, we had a separate vendor supply the EDI Interface software and provide maintenance on that software. EDI is Electronic Data Interchange is how many large systems send and receive orders, invoices, and such via telephone lines. It has been in use for probably 20 years of not longer. Many new "Internet" type transactions and e-commerce are broken down into EDI codes. EDI isn't as sexy sounding as E-commernce to most people but many E-Commerce transactions get turned into EDI transacrtions so it's the same thing, it's been around longer, and most major business systems are EDI capable.
Anyway, enough of the history. When our Oracle system was moved to Megacorps Datacenter, along with it went the EDI software. Now, not all of SmallCorp's facilities were on this system that moved. 5 facilities who use this Oracle system are trying to be sold off so those 5 still run on the original Smallcrop systems that are still in the original Smallcorp headquarters. The other 13 places went to the system we migrated to Megacorp. Those are the 13 Megacorp is keeping. Roughly 70% of the EDI customers are on system running in Megacorp and another 30% are still on the original system. The "experts" at Megacorp have re-negotiated the maintenance contract for this EDI software that runs on the system they now maintain. The cost has doubled!!! We re-negotiated our EDI software maintance contract on the system we still run for the 5 places being sold and it went down. It should... there are less people using the EDI software. This makes sense. However, I can not explain how the EDI costs have doubled for Megacorp's system. There are less users than we had as a whole before, the system is going away, and no new EDI customers are being added (since the system is going away).
I can only attribute it to their "world class" bargaining skills. You would think the costs of the Megacorp's EDI should have gone down because there are fewer people than before. But, that is only common sense and I have learned there is little common sense at Megacorp. This maintenance is based on that types of transactions and how many EDI customers there are.
I knwo what happened. Our EDI software vendor saw a Fat Cat customer like Megacorp come in and our EDI software people fleeced them! It makes me laugh! The places that use this EDI software running on Megacorp's server are of course, being charged this maintenance and they are upset (rightfully so) that it is more than double what they paid in the past. Why do I say it as more than doubled? The bill for these 13 places is double what the bill previously was for the original 18 but since it is being split over only 13 places, each factory's bill has more than doubled.