Standard Term Servicing is provided by AVEVA for all Citect versions which includes 3 years of full support.
After the 3 years the following support is dropped.
Minor and Major version releases
Patches to address non-critical issues
Ability to request Hot Fixes
Testing of Microsoft Security Updates
Long Term Servicing is provided for other AVEVA SCADA platforms on the latest releases providing 5 years of full support.
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Idea business value
Not providing LTS on PlantSCADA while providing it on other AVEVA SCADA systems may give the impression that PlantSCADA isn't being given as much attention than the other systems. Having a reduced support period could discourage people to not apply MS patches to critical system as they haven't been tested to be compatible. |
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| Idea priority | 3 – Some use to my company |
In my experience, too often a full version upgrade, which requires an uninstallation of the old version, will fail in a way that requires a clean install of Windows to fix. This means that in a non-trivial environment, a full version upgrade will only be considered alongside routine hardware replacements where the clean install is a requirement anyway.
On top of this, it's unlikely that we will be doing the above on day one of a new PS release - our annual quiet periods tend to be at the end of the calendar year which means any new release will usually be nearly a year old. Which means that a 3yr support period equates to little over 2 years from install, and hardware is expected to last at least 3-4y before replacement.
Therefore a 5y support period would be helpful (and would make Customer First an easier sell).
3 years isn't very long for a product of this nature.
This would be very helpful for my projects in the critical infrastructure. Deploying a new major Plant SCADA release on hundreds of machines requires more than a year of planning, testing, and deployment. Installing an update has much less impact on our production platforms.