Personally, I find the concept of having to buy a contract to get bug fixes to be unethical. That would be like buying a new car, then paying another $10,000 to have a warranty.
I realize that the contract also involves phone support, but realistically, regardless of how many seats we buy, all questions would go through one person. So why would we need to pay multiple times for this service?
Also at issue is the fact that there is maintenance on every add-on that we would need, such as FormatWorks (which I feel is necessary as we work with some pretty nasty customer supplied surface files sometimes). The bottom line is that we are looking at around $40,000 a year in maintenance, and that's a pretty hard sell to our company president.
As far as upgrades, is it really worth it? Does SolidWorks get that much better every year that we could get a ROI on that $40,000 each and every year? Really, after about 4 years we would have paid enough to buy it all over again.
And what about 2007 vs 2006? IS 2007 a lemon? Our demo time with it was so short that we weren't able to really put it through it's paces.
Thanks,
Dan