Software
licensing costs skyrocket
By
Sean Emery
On-line Forty-Niner
Technology: New campus software has helped
advance CSULB in the computer age, but costs
make future uncertain.
Amid
continuing budget difficulties, the rising
cost of licensing software packages is creating
concern within the academic computing services
department at Cal State Long Beach.
In
the past few years, the cost of licensing
a variety of statistics program, as well
as the Blackboard system upon which the
MyCSULB is based, has been rapidly rising.
These rising costs have led to uncertainty
about the future cost of these programs,
as well as questions about the effect it
will have on the campus budget.
“It’s
hard to say [what the effect will be], because
it appears to me that you don’t have
a truly competitive market situation,”
said Edwin McBride, the director of academic
computing services. “We’re trying
to keep an eye on things, and see if a trend
is developing here of software companies
beginning to think that they have a captive
audience, and that university customers
are almost locked in [to these programs].”
The
prices for many software packages used at
CSULB are determined through deals that
the manufacturers have made with the CSU
system as a whole. The decision of which
particular software packages to use is based
on requests made by the faculty of the college.
“The
CSU system has a number of agreements they’ve
negotiated with software vendors,”
McBride said. “Some of these set a
certain price for the members of the [CSU]
system, but the individual campus agrees
to buy it or not buy it.”
One
area that has seen significant increase
in costs over the past few years has been
in the purchasing of statistical software
licenses. Currently, CSULB uses three different
statistical software systems: Minitab, SAS,
and SPSS. Minitab is being purchased directly
by the university, while SAS and SPSS are
being purchased through deals negotiated
by the CSU system as a whole.
The
costs for licensing the Minitab and SAS
software have stayed fairly stable over
the past few years, with the university
spending roughly $3,000 a year on Minitab
and $6,000 a year for SAS. However, the
cost to license the SPSS software has increased
dramatically over the past three years.
Last year it cost the university $7,000
to license the software. That figure rose
to $21,000 this year, and is projected to
rise to $23,000 next year.
“They
have never explained the [price] jump,”
said Stafford Cox, a statistical and network
consultant. “They’re playing
hardball. They’re business decision
is ‘we’re that good that your
just going to have to pay the price.’”
According
to representatives at SPSS, the price increase
was a result of the terms of the license
being reviewed and brought up to current
standards. Bob Valencic, an account executive
at SPSS, said that the pricing structure
had remained stagnant during the late ’90s
and early ’00s, and didn’t take
into account several features which the
university had been receiving for free.
McBride
said that the price increase forced the
university to determine whether or not the
use of the software was integral to the
curriculums of the departments that use
it.
“We contacted as many people as we
could to see if they would be willing to
switch, but we found out that it just wasn’t
practical,” McBride said. “The
conversion costs [to switch programs] are
very high. The software companies know that,
and they know that you aren’t going
to switch packages lightly.”
The
popularity of the SPSS and SAS systems,
as well as their importance for accreditation
purposes, also make it difficult for the
university to consider changing to less
expensive software packages.
“There
is a huge credibility and reputation issue
for the university,” Cox said. “[These
programs] are nationally and internationally
recognized as the premiere statistical programs.”
The
other major area where licensing costs have
been rising is in the use of the Blackboard
system, which provides the framework for
the universities BeachBoard Online programs.
According to Crista Copp, the instructional
technology manager, when the university
first started using the system five years
ago it only cost $5,000 a year to license.
That figure rose over the years to $25,000,
and eventually to $100,000 a year. In June
2003 the CSU system signed its current licensing
deal with the Blackboard system, which cost
the university a total of $120,000 for an
18-month deal, which will run out in December.
“The
CSU is working with Blackboard to see about
a renewal contract,” Copp said. “We’re
expecting the licensing price to come back
about the same.”
According
to Copp, the prohibitive price of changing
systems, combined with the lack of appropriate
alternatives, means that the university
has no plans to switch to a different system.
Also
effected by price increases have been a
number of specialty centers being run through
the CSU system. One of these centers, the
business specialty center, was dropped completely
CSULB due to budget cuts.
“[The
price] was about the same as in previous
years, but with the budget shortfall they
did not have the money to support it this
year,” Cox said. “Instead of
paying $23,000, [the college of business]
opted not to participate.”
Other
centers are choosing to deal with budget
difficulties by limiting the number of services
that they provide to the campus.
“The
price for the social science database actually
went down,” Cox said. “What
they decided to do was to try to keep it
alive by just providing the database on
the Web with very little [technical] support.”
So
far, the rising costs have been contained
in large part due to the money available
to the university through the state lottery
fund.
“State
lottery money must go directly to programs
that support students, and so we use it
a lot of the time for software,” said
McBride. “We’ve been fortunate
the last couple years that we’ve gotten
lottery money that has deferred a large
part of the increase, but it doesn’t
pay for all of it, and we are still worried
about rising costs.”
For
some departments these rising costs are
forcing them to spend a larger percentage
of their overall budget on software licenses,
and have taken away money that would have
been available for other costs related to
the use of technology.
“It’s
not only about software licensing costs.
We have many resource costs involved,”
said Copp. “Unfortunately, our budget
has not changed to take into account these
[rising software costs].”
University
officials were quick to point out that not
all software companies have raised their
prices.
“[There
isn’t] some big crisis where every
single software company is raising their
prices, in fact most them have been fairly
stable,” McBride said. “It’s
just that a couple of them have had such
dramatic increases that there is a concern
that if it becomes widespread it would be
difficult to deal with.”
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