When we got in touch with the french Business Manager in charge of Arkeia, he just transfered our request and asked someone at the sales department to answer us but this person told us that she was leaving the company.
For information, it appears that whereas it was not possible to buy Arkeia licences in February 2015, WD strategy as changed a bit, a quotation for a licence in order to add capacity to our diskstorage has been sent to us last week .
But we are still waiting for an official answer about the discontinuation of the product, and the official website should mention it on the frontpage.
We are clients, we have paid for an enterprise solution named Arkeia, we are not simple customers, we are investing in product for long lasting term.
Western Digital should not handle its clients this way if he wants to keep them, so please be honest and communicate.
WD continues to support existing WD Arkeia customers under maintenance contracts through their expiration. Customers will be able to renew their maintenance and also purchase additional software licensing through December 2018. In the case where customers have purchased extended maintenance agreements, we will support those agreements through 2019.
Thanks for clarifying this. I am sad that WD has decided to kill this product, especially so shortly after purchasing it and even more shortly after releasing v11 in Feb. I have some questions/comments about the way this has been done.
RE : 1. This ‘end-of-sales’ position is not generally known nor is it being made known via the WD Arkeia web pages. So as far as the public is concerned it is still business as usual. This is very unprofessional and reflects poorly on ALL of WD. Why would anyone want to do any business with such an unprofessional company? Trust is being destroyed.
RE : 3. This represents another communications mess that destroys trust since here in a forum the message is “sustaining support” and yet the official public website says otherwise:
Overall a very sad event handled very poorly at best.
Will you be giving refunds (up to 100%) to those that have purchased maintenance within the 12 months prior to your unofficial, secret killing of the product (one does wonder when that happened and how some folks heard about it, such as the OP for this thread)? It would be fair since one reason maintenance is purchased is to fund and get access to new product releases that have support for updated clients/targets like vmware v6