Terms for Contracted Spectre (Clinical) Support

(Author: Roland Rashleigh-Berry                                                            Date: 21 Sep 2011)

The only supported feature of Spectre Clinical as of 2011 is the clinical reporting macro suite. From the start of 2012 then these require a licence fee to use unless certain conditions are met. These terms are explained on the Spectre download page. The other macros and scripts are free for people to use but not supported.

Cost of licences

The cost of licences for the Spectre clinical reporting macros is stated on the download page and these are the official figures. If you see any figures stated elsewhere then these do not count. Only the download page has the official figures.

Types of Licence holders

Remember that a licence is only required for using the Spectre Clinical Reporting macros and is only required if you use them "for real", which means true analysis of data on real data or for QC purposes. You can use the macros purely for your own personal study if you want to learn about macros. If you are studying these macros and part of your learning is analysing data that has been analysed before but you are just repeating it as a given assignment as part of an official study course then no licence is required for doing this.

There are two types of licence holder: Individual licence holders and Block licence holders.

Block licence holders

These are the people who drive Spectre Clinical forwards and are the most important type of licence holder. They will come up with needs for change and perhaps requests for new reporting macros. Their requests for change and new macros will be listened to. They pay less per person per licence than individual licence holders because they are expected to pool all their requests for maintenance and change through a central point of contact, which makes it more efficient, so they are effectively paying more per user than the individual licence holders. In turn, they get more support and their requests are listened to.

As a special incentive then if a company has a standard data structure then I will help them write the macros that call the Spectre macros. Spectre Clinical reporting macros are supposed to be "core" macros that are called by other macros. This is the way you should be calling them if you have a standard data structure. I will help in this so that you are in a clear position to see if these macros can bring you greater efficiency. I will do this work for free for large organisations in the hope that they are sufficiently impressed to pay the block licence fee.

The licence fees shown on the download page may be increased in the future without notice but existing individual and block licence holders will be able to keep their old rate for their current block size indefinitely. The licence fee reduction for block licences for 2011 are there because early customers will be involved in a lot of work helping me straighten out the product. So to reward them for their efforts the low price will remain fixed indefinitely at the low level for their block size and will be regarded as beta sites (but with no commitments). After the product is settled then later customers will be charged a more realistic fee with likely annual increases since they will be able to benefit from the macros with less initial effort.

For block licence holders then you will normally require a period of time to evaluate the macros so I grant permission to use them on two studies for free.

Individual licence holders

Individual licence holders (i.e. not having a block licence) are just users of the macros as they stand. Bugs will be fixed, as fixing bugs has the highest priority, but requests for changes will usually not be acted on but will be collected together and suggested to the block licence holders. Whether the changes are adopted or not will depend on the responses from the block licence holders. This may seem a poor deal but if I made frequent changes for the many individual licence holders then the macros would be going through a constant state of flux with possible bugs as a result and then no large company would want to use my macros.

As an individual licence holder you will be the beneficiary of any new developments written for the block licence holders but only once the developments are complete, thoroughly tested and proven in the field.

The licence fees shown on the download page may be increased in the future without notice but existing individual licence holders will be able to keep their old rate for their current individual user count indefinitely.
 

Cost justification

I am going to make the argument for cost justification at this point.

Firstly, look at the demo outputs for %unistats and %npcttab and work out whether they fit in with your reporting standards. If they do not and you can't live with their format then these macros are not for you.

If they fit in with your expectations then consider that these macros cope well with ODS output, are loaded with statistical reporting capabilities, have been in regular use at a CRO for more than four years so most bugs were discovered and fixed years ago. It is a stable and mature reporting system. Maybe you lack a reporting system or you have one and you will upgrade it sometime in the future. I would estimate that developing from scratch or upgrading an existing system would use up more than 2000 man hours with consultations and the stop and go cycles, cost €200K and take a year. And what is finally written might not be as good as hoped for so if you are unlucky so you might have to spend another €100K and it might take another six months. And once you have a good working system then the yearly maintenance costs will be about 10% of original system cost which would be €20K minimum (I might be being naïvely optimistic but please bear with me).

Suppose you have 100 programmers. With what I am offering you get a system that you can evaluate for free. You get extra help for free to have macros written that fit your data structure. It costs you nothing and then you can evaluate whether the macros are worth paying a licence fee for. So you get a new system for free and pay only €10K (plus applicable sales tax) per year for the support, maintenance and new macros.

It is true that I will drop dead one day and you might wonder what will become of the reporting system. But you have the code and the code will stay on the Internet. I doubt I am the best SAS programmer in the world. Somebody in India or China will be better than me and see the profit in taking over the maintenance of the macros and will seize the opportunity and advertise their services. Life carries on. Nobody is indispensable.

€10K per year (plus appl. sales tax) for a proven reliable, mature and powerful reporting system is better than €200K and a year's wait to create your own system, followed by €20K per year maintenance (it could be more on both counts if you are unlucky). One is predictable, the other not. You save money. I make money. We both win.

Suppose you had 200 programmers then it would cost you €20K per year. That's more serious money and you might contemplate writing your own system. But then you would be my main customer and would naturally get the best support. And your wishes for enhancements would take precedence over others. Compare that with hiring a principal sas programmer to work on the same thing.

From my side, I am hoping that a few large organisations will licence my macros. I am hoping 1000 programmers will use my macros, about the maximum I could support, but maybe there will be 500 programmers at best giving me €50K per year. I could get a permanent job paying more than that, but then I could top up the €50K doing extra work. But then again, I am approaching retirement age, and €50K a year would be a good enough pension.

So work out whether there is sufficient cost justification, but I think it is a no-brainer.
 
 
 


 

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