I currently work for a city that has not paid any ESRI maintenance since around 2010. This was a couple years before I started working here and it has continued the whole time I've been here. I've tried to see about getting caught up a couple of times but ESRI has always been pretty strict about paying all back maintenance. They have offered "deals" but they always seem to involve a discount on the back maintenance that requires a purchase of technical services that always magically matches the amount we were "saving" on the maintenance. Sooo.. we've stayed on 10.0. ESRI currently has an offer that would allow us to pay for next years maintenance and they would forgive all back maintenance. This is fantastic as it would save us over 30,000 that we don't have. The problem now lies in that to update the few licenses we do have is just over 8,000 and our new budget year just started in October so this amount is not in our budget. Because of this we will have to go before council and ask for the money. We have a rather reactionary council that seems to like waiting until something breaks and then replacing it as opposed to upgrading software/hardware proactively. My issue now is that I need good solid reasons as to why they should give us the money to upgrade. Simply telling them that this is a newer version will not work as the old version still functions. We are a small city so the vast majority of the changes made in the versions since 10.0 are of no real necessity to me. One of the reasons I've never really pushed the issue to hard in the past is that even as of today there is nothing lacking in 10.0 that prevents me from doing my job on a daily basis. My biggest frustrations lie with ESRI and how their website appears to be scrubbing old content on a regular basis. Trying to find articles or scripts that work/apply to 10.0 is getting more and more difficult. This alone will not get them to give me the money. Telling them it is saving 30+ thousand dollars will not work because they wouldn't have given me the 38,000 it would cost to get everything caught up either. Can anybody help me out with some good reasons that I can give them as to why we would need to take advantage of this offer as opposed to just keeping on like we've been doing at 10.0?
tell them 10.0 is not even on the life cycle support system... you might also mention (or not) that ArcGIS Pro will be on the 'forever' horizon and you will need to move forward at some stage (did you use ArcView 3.x at one time? or ArcInfo?... you could mention those time periods of change)
There's also issues with security patches and vulnerabilities that have been identified and corrected in updates since 10.x. That's a factoid that tends to get IT departments to take interest.
