Is Oracle Making You See Red Too?

May, 13 2015 | Kurt Moydell | Vice President, Sales – Americas

Steven Zolman of Net(net), Inc. recently wrote a blog worthy of a David Letterman top 10 countdown titled, “Top 5 Ways Oracle Makes You See Red.”  Despite the fact that he chose to let Oracle off the hook by limiting his focus to 5 commonly expressed customer complaints, Steven’s observations bear witness to the fundamental reasons Oracle customers are adopting third-party software maintenance and support services for their enterprise applications from  Spinnaker Support. The rapid growth of our Oracle maintenance practice is a direct result of the high cost – low value proposition delivered by Oracle to its customers every day.

Steven should know; he is the Chief Services Architect for NET(net), a global business consultancy exclusively specializing in full service IT investment optimization. As such, it is Steven’s role to help NET(net) clients find and keep more economic and strategic value out of their IT agreements.

In his blog, Steven addresses in depth the 5 most common complaints heard, but here is an overview:

  • 5. Bundling of Support – customers are forced into an all-or-nothing approach, bundling technical break/fix product support with product upgradability, which often does not align with the business requirements of an organization.
  • 4.  Re-Pricing Provision – used by Oracle to strongly discourage their customers from right-sizing their environments. Canceling licenses or products an organization is not using will effectively mean the customer loses all discounts originally given, re-pricing the annual maintenance fees based on list price.
  • 3. Matching Support Policy – forcing customers to continue to a high level of support on unrequired licenses or end of life products, only to risk de-supporting critical system environments.
  • 2. Binding of Legacy Maintenance – making it nearly impossible for customers to escape punitive maintenance costs for legacy systems that aren’t being used.
  • 1. Oracle Audits – the number one way Oracle works to maintain control of its highly profitable support revenue streams.

In reading his remarks, Steven understands and articulates Oracle policy and the resulting negative impacts expressed by the Oracle user community. It is an insightful read that is worth your time.

To learn more about how third-party support as an alternative to Oracle Support can alleviate all of these issues while being delivered at a fraction of the cost, click here.

 

Takeaways from CIOReview – SAP Special Edition

May 6, 2015 | Michelle Wilkinson | Director, Marketing

CIOReview magazine just came out with a SAP Special edition. This edition of the magazine is chock full of great information for the SAP user. Included is an article by our Vice President of Global SAP Support Services, Shawn du Plessis. It is a concise overview of considerations for organizations running SAP who are thinking about third-party software support. While the article recognizes that third-party SAP support is not for every organization, some key takeaways include:

– Third parties typically support code modifications / customizations, while standard SAP support does not.

– Senior resources are handling issues / tickets from the first call, rather than relying on a junior person to escalate once the call is taken. These senior engineers are backed up by a team of senior area experts.

– The pricing structure with a third-party provider is typically more flexible in that they will take into consideration the licenses actually being used as well as the number and type of tickets that are typical of the organization. This is a major reason organizations can see significant cost savings with third-party software support.

– The legal landscape of the third-party provider should be taken into account, as that speaks to the integrity of the provider to protect to the software publisher’s intellectual property. A lawsuit could certainly compromise the service levels received after signing on with a third-party provider.

Read the full article and decide for yourself whether third-party SAP support is worth investigating before your notification is due at the end of September.

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SAP ASE EDGE EDITION

This might be the biggest announcement from SAP you never heard of. After dropping the name Sybase from its product names last year, SAP is quietly reshaping its database platform offerings. And I mean this in a good way.

Under the Sybase name there were 2 ASE products; Sybase ASE Enterprise Edition (EE) and Sybase ASE Small Business Edition (SBE). The Sybase ASE EE product was and still is the flagship and the most commonly known edition of Sybase. But it came with a hefty price ticket. To offer a Sybase ASE database server to the SMB market space, Sybase created ASE SBE, limited to 2 CPU sockets and 8 engines on a physical server, at a very low price.

The server virtualization revolution has dramatically changed the server landscape and database servers made their transitions to the new world. The majority of newly deployed database servers are virtualized, either on-premise or in the cloud. The Sybase ASE EE 15.7 database server enabled Sybase clients to make the move to the virtual servers with the introduction of the threaded kernel model. SAP ASE EE 16 continued the optimization for virtual servers and offers one of the most advanced database servers in the market.

However, Sybase ASE SBE never made the step into the virtual world and that was bad news for SMB, who are trying to save money on infrastructure costs. Hence the introduction of SAP ASE Edge Edition.

SAP ASE Edge Edition 16 will retire the old Sybase ASE SBE. It is based on the SAP ASE EE 16 edition with a limit of 4 cores. There will be an SAP ASE Edge Edition 15.7 available later this year. Other than that, SAP pulled out the stops and created an entry-level ASE server that packs features that other databases only offer in their enterprise edition, but set a price point that competes with other vendor’s standard edition database.

The following matrix shows the comparison between SAP ASE Edge Edition and Sybase ASE SBE. But pay close attention to the options that are now included and compare this to other vendor’s standard offerings.

Limits / Options ASE Edge Edition ASE SBE (retired)
Max Engines No Limit 8
Max Cores OS can use 8 No Limit
Max CPU Chips No Limit 2
Max Concurrent User Connections No Limit 256
Options
High Availability na check na check
Disaster Recovery Package na check na check
Security and Directory Services checkmark na check
Encrypted Columns checkmark na check
Partitions checkmark na check
Active Messaging na check na check
Compression checkmark na check
In-Memory Database na check na check
Advanced Backup Services (TSM) na check na check
Enterprise Connect – Oracle na check na check
Enterprise Connect – ODBC na check na check

checkmark (included)  na check (Not Available)

SAP ASE Edge Edition also includes unlimited cores of SAP Replication Server Premium Edition, restricted to warm standby capabilities of SAP ASE Edge data.

If you’re running Sybase ASE SBE today in either server or user based licensing, you should take a closer look at SAP ASE Edge Edition. The savings in server virtualization alone can justify the investment.

If you’re running a shareware database server and would like to upgrade to an enterprise class database system, running on Linux and Windows servers, you should talk to us about SAP ASE Edge Edition.

If you’re planning on implementing a commercial database server in your company and or product, SAP ASE Edge Edition should be on your checklist.

Contact us today to learn more about SAP ASE Edge Edition.

Another great tool in the SAP Edge Series is SAP IQ Edge Edition, Big Data analytics on a budget. Like SAP ASE Edge Edition, SAP IQ Edge Edition is an Enterprise level Analytical Engine at entry level pricing.