Why Support Is Included¶
Support is not a line item you can decline. It is part of what an EEI engagement is, and this page explains why we set it up that way.
What changed in integration work¶
Almost everything built now is connected to something else. Every systems integrator lives with that; it is not a differentiator.
The part that took us a while to see clearly is what a "finished" solution actually is. Having done this for nearly three decades, the pattern is consistent: a delivered solution is rarely a tidy piece of software that runs quietly somewhere. It is a collection of interactive services, talking to systems that are themselves changing — and those services have to live somewhere. Something has to host them, watch them, update them, and notice when an upstream system moves underneath them.
That work does not stop at handover. It starts at handover.
The friction that followed¶
Handing a customer a set of live services to operate creates a problem at the worst possible moment — immediately after a successful delivery.
Many of our customers did not want to own, host, and manage systems that were not part of their core competency. Reasonably so: running an integration platform is not why they are in business, and staffing for it is hard to justify for one solution. So delivery became the point where the value we had just built started to erode, for reasons that had nothing to do with whether the work was good.
Increasingly, customers asked us to run it instead. That request is a large part of why VirtualForge exists — a place for delivered capability to live, operated by the people who built it.
So support is in the price¶
Once you accept that a delivered solution is a living thing, selling support separately stops making sense. It would mean selling something that predictably decays, and separately offering to stop it decaying.
Bundling it means one thing above all: the product you were sold keeps doing what it was sold to do. Concretely, support is what pays for keeping a connector current as the platform it connects to releases, absorbing upstream change, watching what is running, and fixing what breaks without a commercial negotiation first.
It is also why our pricing is recurring rather than a one-off charge — see How We Price. The recurring price and the bundled support are the same decision seen from two sides.
The commitment¶
This has a consequence we accept deliberately: we would rather not make a sale than make one where there is obvious risk to the customer's ability to keep receiving what they were sold.
In practice that means we will sometimes tell you that the thing you are asking for is not supportable in your environment as it stands, or that a dependency outside our control makes the outcome unsafe to promise. We would rather have that conversation before a contract than after one.
It also means we occasionally decline work where the complexity makes a fixed, supported price irresponsible. Saying so is more useful than quoting a number and hoping.
Where the operational detail lives¶
This page is the commercial rationale. For how support actually works in practice:
- Getting Support from EEI — how to raise something and what to include
- The Support page for the product you are using, under Products, which sets out what we commit to and what falls outside scope
- Reading an EEI version number — what a release number tells you about what changed
- Trust — security posture, data handling, and compliance