Which subscription is best for me?

Use the following decision table to determine your best choice.

QUESTION	YES	NO
1. Do you want 2 or more support contacts?	Request a quote	Go to question 2
2. Do you want fast response times (<= 1 business day)?	Request a quote	Go to question 3
3. Do you need a transition time towards a new stable release?	Request a quote	Go to question 4
4. Is flexibility from Atomikos support important to you?	Request a quote	Go to question 5
5. Do you need the most advanced power features?	Request a quote	Go to question 6
6. Do you want to ask questions to our support team?	Request a quote	Go to question 7
7. Do you need advanced features?	Request a quote

Purchasing Questions

How does purchasing go?

1. You ask for a quote on our Customer Portal.
2. We send you the quote.
3. You approve the quote on our Customer Portal.
4. After receipt of the above, we immediately send the on-boarding instructions directly to your named contacts.
5. We send you the invoice.

How does pricing work?

Our pricing scales with the number of named technical contacts on your end. There is no CPU or core counting involved.

Why do I need named contacts?

Depending on the type of subscription you choose, named contacts can:

• Receive on-boarding instructions via email.
• Access our customer maven repository (i.e., access the software).
• Contact our support.
• Receive notifications about new releases / patches.

How many named contacts do I need?

You probably want to include at least as many as you need for on-call turn rotations.

For instance, if you have 4 people each taking turns for on-call duty, plus one backup in case of sick-leave or holidays, then you probably want at least 5 named contacts (so you can cover support of your production systems on each day of the year).

Also, if you want to invite 10 people to a support-related conference call then you will need all those people as named technical contacts.

Can I change my named contacts while my subscription is on-going?

For exceptional events (like a named contact permanently leaving the project or your company) you can substitute a different contact at no extra charge. However, intentionally "handing over" or "rotating" within your existing team is not allowed; instead, please consider adding extra contacts to cover your rotation needs.

What installations / environments do I need to count for my license?

None. Our pricing scales with the number of named technical contacts at the customer's.

Are there any CPU or core limits?

No, unless you want self-support.

Are group emails allowed as named contacts?

No. That would not be fair, because our pricing scales only with the number of contacts. Group emails could allow you to present 100 contacts as only 1 - which would be cheating.

Why can't you accept my company's terms and conditions?

Please note that we offer indemnification and other warranties that are only possible under certain conditions that we control (i.e., under our terms). We are sure your company will appreciate that extra coverage and peace of mind.

Typically the deals that failed for us did not fail for technical reasons but rather because our (re)insurance did not accept the changes in terms requested by our prospective clients.

Also, it has cost us a lot of effort to get to a "reasonably acceptable" terms and conditions document. At the risk of extra delays in the order of magnitude of several months, we can attempt to make our terms more acceptable to your company - but only if that is of benefit to all our other clients too, and provided the changes get accepted by our insurance agency and our lawyers.

That's the thing with offering a low cost licensing model - we can offer a virtually unlimited deployment license at the cost of a single CPU license of the typical enterprise vendor, but we have to standardise a bit to make that work.

Why does the quote mention auto-renewal?

Our subscription includes not just support, but also the license (right to use) for our commercial software. You probably don't want to lose that right by forgetting to renew, so that's why we think auto-renewal is the best model.

For what it's worth: we had some (but relatively few) cancellations and those all went smoothly - it's in nobody's interest if we were to force customers to stick with Atomikos because that would be more trouble for either side.

Can I reduce the cancellation notice if I don't want to renew?

In order to cancel, you need to either remove our commercial product from your project, or downgrade your project to our free open source edition. Either way, this will take some time and effort on your end, so our cancellation period is designed to allow for that. For that reason, make it shorter is unrealistic and we prefer to be clear about that.

How do I downgrade?

Downgrading is explained here.

Support Questions

Can I stay on TransactionsEssentials and get support only if I need to?

No, because TransactionsEssentials is not supported and ExtremeTransactions includes hundreds of changes / fixes. Staying on TransactionsEssentials would mean you have to switch to a new release with many, many changes. If you have an emergency then the risk would be too high, we can't guarantee our SLA in that case. If you are hesitating then please consider our free trial first to make sure it works.

Reseller-Specific Questions

I am a reseller. How do I purchase?

1. You ask us for a quote, including the desired subscription type and the names + email addresses of your customer's named contacts.
2. We send you the quote.
3. You send back a signed purchase order based on our quote, or pay us directly.
4. After receipt of the above, we immediately send the on-boarding instructions directly to your customer's named contacts.
5. We send you the invoice.

How will you use the personal details of my customer's contacts?

We use the email details of our technical contacts to:

1. Identify them in our software access and support systems (so they can use our software and support).
2. Send notification emails for new releases / patches.
3. Send on-boarding instructions via email.
4. Sometimes we invite them to connect on LinkedIn (but not always).

In other words: we use the personal data to maintain a healthy supplier relationship so they can get the most out of our products and services.

We don't use the personal data for anything else, and we definitely do not sell it, nor do we give it away to others.

Do I get a reseller or volume discount?

No, but you are free to take an uplift on any quotes we give you.

Some background: if customers want to go via resellers like you then it's because we (Atomikos) are not an approved supplier in their organisation. We always tell our customers that resellers are fine for us, and that they will have to pay an uplift. For those customers that work with resellers this has never been a problem - even if they are able to see our uniform pricing on our public website, or have gotten a similar quote from us already.

By the way, not giving discounts also works to your advantage: we always charge the same price, so there is no benefit for us to cut you out of any deal or renewal by trying to deal with the end customer directly (because our ask price would be the same). We just won't make that move, and the end customer probably won't either because they asked you to be there in the first place.

How will the software (license) be delivered to my customer?

All the necessary instructions will be sent directly to the named technical contacts provided by your end customer, once we receive either payment or a signed purchase order.

I read that I can't redistribute - how is that possible if I am a reseller?

As a reseller, you can "redistribute" to the particular end customer's named contacts for whom you are requesting a quote from us, but not to other customers. Actually, as explained above, it's us who will send all details to these named contacts. You are not supposed to share any of those details with your other customers.