Third-party application maintenance (TMA)

Third-party application maintenance, or TMA, is the outsourcing to a provider of the maintenance of one or more applications owned by the customer or operated by it under licence. The provider takes charge of correcting defects, functional evolutions and adaptation to technical or regulatory changes. Third-party application maintenance differs from maintenance provided by the software publisher, covered by the Computer maintenance contract, in that it most often concerns bespoke or configured applications.

The content of the third-party application maintenance agreement

First, the scope: list of applications, versions, environments and interfaces covered, and distinction between corrective, evolutionary and adaptive maintenance. Next, the organisation: knowledge transfer phase from the outgoing team, governance, steering committee, request and validation procedures. Then the service commitments: response and resolution times by severity level, evolution capacity expressed in work units, service level agreement and penalties. Finally, the price, often made up of a fixed fee for corrective work and a rate per work unit for evolutions.

Intellectual property issues

Third-party application maintenance requires the provider to hold the rights needed to modify the application. Where the application is bespoke, the customer must own the rights or hold a licence authorising maintenance by a third party. Where the application is a software package, the publisher’s licence must allow a third party to intervene, failing which the modification infringes copyright. The developments made by the TMA provider must be assigned to the customer in compliance with the formalities of the Intellectual Property Code, which can be consulted on Légifrance. The contract also deals with confidentiality and access to data.

Key points

In practice, the success of a TMA rests on the quality of the transfer phase, on the documentation of the application and on an exit clause allowing a change of provider without loss of knowledge. Disputes concern the quality of corrections, missed deadlines and the ownership of evolutions. The firm drafts these contracts and acts in these disputes, as presented on the page contracts.