A Letter from Allen Cronce, President of PACE

[iLoksupport]

Hello,

This is Allen Cronce, President of PACE.

The past week has been one of the hardest weeks of my entire life. As I read through this thread, it honestly pains me that our mistakes have caused so much frustration and interrupted workflow. I haven’t been able to sleep and can barely eat. I know I should have addressed you all sooner, but I feel such shame for how this new launch has been executed, that I've been focusing our efforts on getting to a resolution, so you can all get back to work. I've never been in a situation like this and I realize our customer relations skills have been severely lacking. If you read on, you will see how I plan to change this.

I started PACE because I am passionate about technology. I know the amount of work that companies large and small go through to develop great software products and I truly believe that these software products need to be protected from piracy. PACE has had a long run without many hiccups, which is something rare for any technology company.

That is why this past Monday I was shocked to see that the software that we at PACE have all been working on so hard for the past few years was launched with such unexpected technical errors… errors that have caused some users like you to be troubleshooting rather than working. I cannot tell you how upsetting that is to our entire team.

Even though its introduction has been rough, I am still very proud of the new iLok License Manager. The sole purpose of our new product is to make the iLok system better for you, the customer. We will get it working. We will make this right. We will prove to you that we are good people, honest people, with a good product that has the best intentions: to protect your investment and to protect the software industry's hard work.

Although our support team is working around the clock, I plan to improve our customer support so we can help you more effectively. We're going to update our website with more information and alert new users of the potential problems… something we should have done earlier. I was just optimistic that we'd have a solution earlier, but this was a mistake and I'm truly sorry.

We will continue to work with customers to solve issues they have had with the new iLok License Manager. We will maintain a presence here and post updates of our progress.

Once again, we realize we have let you down. The best thing we can do at this point is continue to focus our efforts on solving any outstanding problems to make sure our customers are up and running. You are going to see some big changes at PACE.


Allen Cronce

[Benoni]

Thanks for the post. It's good to know that PACE is listening.

Try to get some rest and go out for your favorite meal. You will work better when your body gets the rest and nutrition it needs. It's not worth getting physically ill over.

I am confident PACE will fix the outstanding issues.

Thanks again for keeping us "in-the-loop", that goes a long way.

Good Luck.

[Buccanears]

Seems like the logical path is to sit back and wait until Pace sort out their issues. Unfortunately lost a day trying to upgrade a PT9HD rig to 10HD today.
The ilok License Manager was not not playing ball and kept crashing out on Mac and PC. I will wait this one out until there's some consensus that it's AOK. I like iLok as a system and am sure they are doing everything they possibly can to get over this bumpy ride. At least I could put the rig back together as a PT9HD system with no loss of auths. Thanks for the humble update, Allen and hope you and your team are coping ok.

[Perfect 5th]

Geez thanks. What about the revenue lost by professionals who are locked out of their systems because you released a client program that was fundementally broken?

Why not revert back to the old system while fixing the bugs instead of using the 'users' of the system to troubleshoot?

Don't say sorry, just fix it.

[kaiserpathos]

+1

This message is not intended for us, the users, anyway: it's for developers and products using their asset protection.

While expressing that he's sorry and having loss of sleep etc over our downtime and workflow hindrance, Pace's beta-testing their new product with users the past week+ has still gone forward. Hopefully our "feedback" guides this beta to a close. :P

But, yeah, that message was written to quell developer-worry: Pace can lose 1000 customers but if they lose one or two key products they would take a hit. That's understandable since their value is in asset protection for product makers, so we end-users and our downtime is naturally a secondary concern. But, hey, at least it's secondary and not non-existent! lol Maybe a couple of free years of iLok ZDT (an oxymoron product now) will be nice in return for our troubles.

[Perfect 5th]

Yup. If I had access to the new license I paid for I would sell them. There are plenty of software DAW options out there that don't deal with this crap.

Another concern is that Avid is basically doing nothing for a workaround to help out. We'll just give money to Avid, and get nothing in return.

Logic is looking better by the minute.

[johnfawcett]

Kaiser, you are spot on. I know it has been said a million times before, but this kind of DRM ONLY hurts paying customers. I'm tired of being treated as a potential thief by avid. I've been a paying customer since version 5, and will not give avid another dime as long as they continue their relationship with pace. I find it absolutely ridiculous, that my paid for version of protools is completely unusable, and can be held hostage by a company that i am forced to do business with in order to use protools.

[TVPostSound]

You guys weren't around for floppy authorizations, were you??

When a SCSI Mac 9600 crashed back then, it took down your auth, you had a second floppy disk as backup, you used it.
Second crash, you had no auths left. It was real fun being with Digidesign on the phone, trying to get back up and running.
IF you could convince them you weren't a thief, it would be 3 to 4 days to get another floppy in the mail, at a cost.

10 years ago, when PT6 was an iLok authorized product, I BEGGED Digidesign to allow me to send in my last Machine Control, and Digitranslator floppies, and get me an iLok authorization for them. Which they did.

This is the first time in 10 years Ive had an issue.
Oh and PT6 along with Machine Control, and Digitranslator are still on the iLok server as of this morning!!


Keep it up Allen, I spoke with Andrew Saturday evening, and have been in email contact everyday since. This morning, all my iLoks synched back to normal. Around 5 seconds per iLok.

[tonkasound]

Dear Allen, I think I speak for 1000s of post-professionals in Hollywood..

Whilst we are sorry to hear you're losing sleep over this. We were sorrier still to discover that Pace was so unprepared to develop and support a product that thousands of us depend on..

I think the real issue with the entire iLok experience is that it's compulsory and therefore a monopoly.

This debacle is a perfect example of what happens when market forces are unable to exert influence on companies' products.

Complacency brought on by an unassailable marketplace dominance is always the result.

Who can build a better mousetrap when only one company is allowed to market the trap?

Shame on you.

[toolowd]

I will have to BORROW MONEY to pay overhead and payroll.

Apology NOT Accepted.

Period.