I work for an academic institution in Surrey that has been using Adobe CS3 Suite since 2009. Many of the Adobe tools are used around the school between students and staff, and it has become a required resource for many.
With the last few PCs around the school being moved to Windows 7, and our Media department's request to move to Premiere Pro and After Effects, it became clear that we would need to upgrade. We looked at the CS6 Master Suite and the possibility of beginning a volume license agreement that could help keep us up to date in the future.
Then Adobe announced that there would be no CS7 and that the Creative Cloud subscription service would be the only way to access the CS suite in the future.
Last month we received a quote for CS6 that would cover our whole school. We would own all of the Adobe CS suite applications, we could put them on all of our PCs (where relevant) and it would cost us approx. £9.5k
Hearing that CC was replacing CS7 we received a revised quote to see what the equivalent would be on the new CC system. The quote for CC was £19.5k (!?!)
I have since contacted Adobe support to question this, as it seemed implausible that Adobe would just start charging academic institutions double what they were being charged a month ago. After speaking with several people on Adobe's "support" line I have received no explanation. No clarification. I have no idea where we stand with these products now. The only thing that has been explained to me is that with CC "you get to always have the most recent version of the application". How is this a benefit worth paying double for? Under the old license scheme I could have purchased a completely new version of the CS Master Suite every year on site license, and it still would only be costing half what the Creative Cloud now costs..
One support lady even quoted me £15k per month to use CC based on our staff numbers. Have Adobe gone literally insane? The world is under a global recession and you are quoted academic institutions with 150 FTEs £15k a month to use your software?!?
From everything I have seen so far, the Creative Cloud is an enormous scam. It is a way for Adobe to halve its costs, yet charge double. There is no benefit to what is now offered for us. There is also no choice.
Unfortunately as Adobe owns thus entire sector, there are no other competitors to look at. I will have to purchase (the now end-of-life) CS6 suite. Hopefully this will last us a few years, and by that time Adobe's "visionary" management will be gone and there will actually be an academic licensing system of use.
From Adobe’s website:
”The Adobe Education Enterprise Agreement (EEA) offers substantial savings to primary and secondary schools and higher education institutions on volume software purchases of creative and Adobe® Acrobat® software. EEA provides your institution access to feature releases and updates for the products licensed over the EEA term”
So our costs going from £9.5k to £19.5k is Adobe’s idea of “substantial savings”. Is this incompetence or just a flagrant lie? To keep this price in perspective, £19.5k is more than we pay for Windows, Office, VMWare, Veeam, Symantec Backup, SEP & Altiris combined.
Are there any other schools in the same boat? Have we been horribly mis-quoted? Have Adobe lost the plot? Any information would be greatly appreciated.