(Thin smile...)   No patents and no money for lawyers to fight them if they had them.   “Cutting all costs” means going out of business, and competitors might find nothing of value.   Furthermore, these are well-respected going concerns whose work is still very important to their customers’ own business operations.   “Falure is really not an option,” and it’s no place for flippant responses.   (I mean no offense by that, and cordially apologize right here in public if any would be taken.)

In that case it's easy. If failure is really not an option, just tell the customers you're going to go out of business unless they give you eleventy squillion currency units.

There will always be grandfather/old customers who are too set in their ways or the cost is too high to switch. If you live in the USA, you will get my point in this link http://www.qltcls.com/, otherwise Google "Bell System".