Autodesk recently unveiled its new support offerings. What does this mean for a Softimage customer?
- Advanced support is basically Gold support renamed. You don’t lose any Subscription benefits that you already have.
- Basic support is not available for Softimage and a handful of products, such as MotionBuilder, Showcase, Alias, and Simulation. In general, the reason why these products don’t have Basic are 1) they are acquisitions and we are maintaining the same level of support as they had before, and 2) they are complex products that require a high-level (eg expertise level) of support that our partners cannot provide.
- Up & Ready support is available for 90 days (it was previously 30). So if you buy Softimage but not Subscription, you get 90 days of Up & Ready support for install and licensing problems.
- Per-incident support is available for Softimage (it wasn’t before). Again, this is good for non-Subscription customers only. I believe it costs something like $150US.
Overall, the purpose of these new support offerings is to let the [majority of] customers choose the support that is right for them.
eX-SI 
Is remote desktop assistance and API support new to Advanced support? I don’t remember those being specified in the Gold.
Remote desktop support was available before, but now it is something we want to emphasize and do more of, for Advanced customers.
Over the past few years, it seems to me that API support has become an unofficial part of Gold. Now it’s official. When I first joined ADSK back in 2008, I think the story was that C++/API supported required ADN membership.