New License Agreements

It’s been about a year and a half since SimpleSync was acquired. Technically speaking the change has been fairly straight forward. Except when it comes to purchasing departments. Out of all two hundred or so active customers, there are a handful of customers who have lawyers involved in the purchase process.

At the time our license agreement was intentionally left to one page. Apparently this is not good enough for some of these lawyer/purchasing agents. The license agreements would come back to us bloated with an extra 15-30 pages of one sided rules. Most of these rules were highly restrictive and demanding. In no uncertain terms we were told to bend to these rules or the sale would not be made. This left a rather bad taste in our mouth in regards to contract negotiation.

Early this month, we had yet another upstart purchasing department making changes to our agreement. Only this time it was different. Instead of making one sided demands they actually offered constructive insight on how to IMPROVE our agreement. The purchasing agent was passing these changes based on what is common in all of her dealings with other suppliers and she wanted to make sure we were on the same level. The changes in fact helped clarify a lot of the terms that were ambiguous in our agreement.

I owe a debt of gratitude to our future customer – Bechtel Corporation. Our license agreements for both SimpleSync and Profiler have been updated with these changes and I believe this act of kindness puts our company in a better legal position than it had before!

Many thanks to Linda Garcia for her patience and helpful guidance.