Information System Maintenance Costs: The "In-between" Challenge

Many of today’s information system products (ISPrs) have a small customer base of maybe five to ten or twenty customers. This puts the vendors into a dilemma. The ISPrs share much of the complexity of mass products, but the vendors cannot afford similar maintenance cost structures. This paper provides guidelines for vendors in such a dilemma. Therefore, it analyzes how the ISPr product version management influences support and upgrade development costs.