CIOs are often superstitious when it comes to stopping maintenance. "The day you take the insurance off your house is the day it burns down," says Lafontan. Last summer he considered letting a maintenance contract on one of his company's systems expire. But Lafontan learned the vendor would tack on an additional percentage of the original contract to future maintenance if he later chose to resume the service, which was enough to dissuade him from stopping the payments.

Cecil Smith, CIO of Duke Energy, advises CIOs to determine who owns the source code before deciding whether or not to stop paying maintenance on an application. If you own the source code, you'll have an easier time getting to the core of the software when a problem pops up. "Typically, this is part of your [initial] negotiation," he says. "Many times what they are doing is selling you the rights to use it for a one-time charge, with the idea that a lot of revenue will be ongoing maintenance fees." If the vendor owns the source code, organizations will have a more difficult time solving a problem.

Smith says that although his company does maintain a large amount of its applications, self-support is not the first option for most packaged applications. "Many companies have streamlined down to where they have little staff, which is why they buy packaged software in the first place." These companies should think twice before stopping maintenance, he says. Likewise, most CIOs warn that stopping maintenance on HR systems is not a good idea, since they often include tax updates that would be too costly to do on your own.

Eastman's Hale dreams of a world where every dollar paid for maintenance returns a dollar of value. "There needs to be some kind of grassroots effort where companies start pushing back and insisting that the software vendors unbundle maintenance and support and give us more visibility into how those dollars are being spent," he says. Short of a great uprising, CIOs are resigned to paying the fees. But they are more careful, negotiating favorable terms up front and getting as much of their money's worth as possible. And when they do not, they aren't afraid to call a vendor's bluff and run unsupported.