From a JDE Support Original: What Winning the Stevie© Award Means to Me

May 27, 2016 | Adriana O’Brien | JD Edwards Senior Application Support Analyst 

I am proud toJDE Support team member, Adriana O'Brien say that I have been here since the beginning of Spinnaker Support. Being part of the first wave to start the JD Edwards (JDE) Support Services team back in September 2008 was a great opportunity in my life. Spinnaker already had the Supply Chain Management (SCM) business up and running. I was part of the group that set the base foundation for the company’s support policies and procedures. In the first 90 days, we were communicating with customers all day long to get them transitioned and set up with Spinnaker Support. It was a rewarding challenge to be a part of the creation of this brand new division at Spinnaker, and now 8 years later, I love to see how much it has grown and evolved, expanding our support to other Oracle applications and technology stack and SAP – and even extending into managed services and consulting.

The Award

Winning the Stevie Award for “Customer Service Team of the Year” is a real honor. When I heard about this, I thought this award just further validates Spinnaker Support’s processes and the effort we’ve put forth since the very beginning and have perfected throughout the years. We were chosen from among 3,400 nominations from organizations of all sizes and industries. This is incredible. It is funny because several years ago when our processes so easily passed ISO 9001:2008 certification, I thought the same thing – “We did it right from the beginning.”

We have watched our vision since inception become a reality and now here we are, winning a prestigious award for customer growth, satisfaction, and loyalty – through great effort and teamwork. Spinnaker Support is always driving forward into the wind and is strong like a ‘SPINNAKER’ sail.

Teamwork

Our team has always worked by this motto – “we will win as a team.” We solve problems for our customers as a team.  The teamwork that we have within Spinnaker Support is the secret to our success. No one tries to outdo another or fix a problem alone. We all have complementary skills, so we use that to our advantage to come up with creative and individual fixes that are best for each unique customer.

I really love working with my Spinnaker Support friends. There is a great work environment, and our management understands and appreciates the human side of its employees. It makes us more loyal without a doubt. Spinnaker Support is a solid company with high integrity. We value teamwork and we care about each other. Management does a lot to keep us together and to show their appreciation for their staff.

Because Spinnaker Support has motivated employees, it shows in the work we do for the customers, which in turn translates to very highly satisfied clients.  We go above and beyond the call of duty to offer the best support possible in the industry. For the past 8 years, it is impressive to see the amount of growth Spinnaker Support has experienced while maintaining industry leading support to its clients. This award validates all that we do and makes me even more grateful to be a part of this team – and to have experienced it from the very beginning. Here’s to 8 more years.

The Top Five Reasons to Have a Database Managed Services Contract

More and more businesses are looking at the advantages of a database managed services contract. It makes good business sense, it makes good technical sense, it makes good administrative sense. Here are five reasons to consider.

  1. Round the Clock Availability. Is your database administrator available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? What if you have a data emergency when he or she is on vacation? With a database managed services contract, your database administrator is there regardless of business fluctuations, holidays, or time of day.
  1. The Global Talent Shortage. Your database needs to be under the care of staff with responsibility for capacity planning, installation, configuration, database design, migration, performance monitoring, security, troubleshooting, backup, and data recovery. Can your organization afford a team including a specialist in each of those ten areas? At Spinnaker Support, we cover our clients for all those specialties.
  1. Cost. How much are you paying in salaries and other costs of employment for your database administrator(s)? Much more than you would pay on a yearly contract, believe me. Another consideration: What is the cost of downtime? Measure it in lost revenue, regulatory fines, and expenditures on remediation. Under a database managed services contract, you are a) unlikely to ever suffer downtime, b) not liable for the costs of remediation, and c) able to get up and running again quickly in the unlikely event it happens, and usually fast enough to prevent the costs of lost revenue and regulatory fines.
  1. Platform Flexibility and Currency. Your business may be using Oracle, SQL, SAP, or whatever. But chances are, you are using the platform you are using because it’s the platform you have always used. With a database managed services contract, these platforms are being actively managed and monitored, while you can explore new and exciting things. Is your database platform up to date? Given the requirements of security and stability, you can’t afford to be running outdated software, but most businesses find they also can’t afford to be the first organization to test out new versions and updates. Your database managed services contractor (particularly if you choose Spinnaker Support) knows how to walk this tightrope.
  1. A Single Point of Contact. When you have data problems, you want a single point of contact. You don’t have the time or energy to for a lot of finger pointing among your programming, maintenance, or operations staff. A managed services contract provides his single point of contact and a piece of mind..

With combined experience in database management and support, the Spinnaker Support team taps into a broad range of database experience to fully service your needs. We save you time and money on database managed services, and we provide you with critical support as well as vital maintenance. Our monitoring methods let us manage system alerts before they become larger issues, so we respond quickly and proactively to unexpected events at all hours of the day.

Three Major Trends in Business Data

We see three big changes occurring in the new world of business data.

  1. Big Data. Data sets that are too large and too complex for traditional data processing are now common, and they are becoming ubiquitous. According to Wikipedia, “As of 2012, every day 2.5 exabytes of data are created.” (An exabyte is 2.5 times 10 to the 18th power.) Personal devices, from smart phones to activity monitors, generate data on nearly all of us — our location, patterns of communication, and behavior. All of this is recorded somewhere; all of it can be processed to yield information that presents business opportunities. While data sets are getting larger, the term “big data” has come to refer not so much to the size of the data sets as their predictive power. A good analytics team can spot correlations in data that unearth business trends, prevent disease, or fight crime. What’s required isn’t processing power (although that helps), but imagination and communication. The hallmark of big data is the way it crosses departmental and disciplinary boundaries.
  1. Unstructured Data. Once upon a time you could only gather data if you created a model of your expected inputs beforehand. Such modeled data can be readily indexed and can give you an excellent view of the business’s performance. But it doesn’t tell you much about, say the content of your customer interactions, which could yield valuable insights for product development and customer motivations. Now if you had transcripts of all customer interactions, those would constitute unstructured data. New technologies are making it feasible to gather such data. New tools make it possible to analyze it. One of the things that is driving the explosion of unstructured data analytics is the growth of social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, YouTube, Digg, and other apps are generating enormous amounts of unstructured data about human beings, their activities, their attitudes, and the products they use or want. Understanding that kind of information is what business is all about.
  1. Location Data. Knowledge of location makes data even more relevant. Just imagine how it would affect your plans to know that, say 50% of your customers used your product only when they were on airplanes, or 80% of your new sales happened in resort towns. As more and more people use smartphones, not to mention activity monitors and the like, this kind of data is being collected somewhere. And businesses are learning better how to access and use it. A story in Business Insider reports that two weeks before Chipotle posted its first-ever quarterly loss, Foursquare, the social media app, predicted the loss and its percentage size. Foursquare also predicted the number of iPhones Apple would sell the weekend it launched iPhone 6. It achieves such feats by analyzing foot traffic.

How can you take advantage of these trends? First, learn what kind of data your own business is gathering and learn what outside data could be useful to you. One of the hallmarks of current data analysis is combining diverse sources of data to gain new and unexpected insights. Second, learn about data mining technology and tools. There are software packages available now that facilitate the finding of patterns and correlations in massive, unstructured data sets. Third, don’t leave it all up to your IT department, but make it a company-wide effort. Making good use of data in this century is a decidedly interdisciplinary effort. Finally, count on Spinnaker Support to help. We have the experience and expertise to evaluate your current and future data needs and help you find your way forward in the new world of business data.

Q&A: Anthony Cefola of Spinnaker Support Oracle Siebel CRM

May 9, 2016 | Spinnaker Support Marketing 

businessman pressing button on virtual screens

Anthony Cefola heads up global operations for Spinnaker Support’s Siebel CRM practice, which was formally launched in May 2013. His team is focused on service delivery and ensuring that customers remain highly satisfied, retained, and loyal. Anthony continues to grow his team of world-class software engineers to meet the market’s increasing demand.

We recently sat down with Anthony for an interview.

Q.  What should we know about your team?

A.  We have assembled a team of “A” players, who I would put up against anybody when it comes to all things Siebel. We have a combined Siebel experience level approaching 200 years, covering support, managed services, and consulting for all versions and products. My team is deployed out of all five of the company’s regional operations centers located in Denver, London, Mumbai, Singapore, and Tel Aviv.

Q.  How long have you personally been involved with Siebel applications?

A.  Back in 2000 I was working for a company that was acquired by Siebel Systems, and my Siebel story began. Back then Siebel was mostly a Desktop Client. I had already been working on the technologies that Siebel used such as operating systems, databases, and client-server architecture, so this was not new to me.  I quickly came up to speed and became a configuration and scripting lead in the support organization.

Then Siebel 7 came out and it was web based.  I loved this change, and it was a breakthrough innovation at the time.  I moved over to the Server side to do installations, upgrades, and administration, becoming area expert.  I later helped develop software for, and run, the Siebel Environment Labs at Siebel – which supported all of Technical Support and much of QA and Development.

I left Siebel around the time of the Oracle acquisition and went to a third-party maintenance company, to build up a new Siebel Support division.  I saw this as an opportunity to deliver specialized support to clients outside of the restrictions of traditional support that relied on a “supportability matrix.” I truly wanted to help clients get what they wanted out of their Siebel implementations.

I joined Spinnaker Support to build up the Siebel Practice and I’ve been leading the team ever since. All in all, I have sixteen years of pure Siebel CRM experience.

Q.  Why do you view Spinnaker Support’s blend of Siebel services as groundbreaking?

A.  When we launched Spinnaker Support’s Siebel practice back in May 2013, our vision was to ultimately build a great team of Siebel software engineers with real-world experience spanning the wide gamut of Siebel versions and products. We also sought to amass A-players possessing deep support, managed services, and consulting experience. We have subsequently hired a great team of troubleshooters, forward thinkers, problem solvers, and technology gurus – who provide incremental value for any Siebel user at any time.

We believe that effective communication is key to success – among our team and with our clients.  Everyone on my team is business trained. We can talk shop to the Siebel administrators and developers, business needs and requirements with the project leads, risk analysis with business analysts, and talk strategy and infrastructure impact with the CIO.  We can very quickly understand their roles, what they want from the Siebel implementation, and how we will help bring it to life.

We believe that the best way to reduce risk to the implementation is with knowledge, and we share freely.  As we diagnose issues and perform root cause analysis we don’t just give steps or answers. We also strive to teach and inform.  We show why we came to a particular conclusion and how to best avoid similar problems in the future.

A strong and diverse team, effective communication, and good coaching; these ingredients are core to our strategy and vision.

With this being said, I’ll circle back to the question. Groundbreaking means first to market. Spinnaker Support is the first and only “pure-play” third-party Siebel support provider that adds a wide range of managed service and consulting services that can move organizations forward faster – regardless of version, product, geographic location, in-house talent level, or surrounding technology ecosystem.  If an organization runs Siebel, with an implementation that scares other vendors, or with an integration that no one has heard of, we want to take on that challenge because we have the team that can do it.

Q.  What market gaps are being filled by Spinnaker Support?

A.  First and foremost, the market has long sought a worry-free alternative to expensive Oracle-provided support. It is nice to know that my company has never violated the intellectual property rights of others. Never have and never will. Yet, our customers still receive world-class support for a fraction of the cost. Worry-free.

Good Siebel software engineers are hard to access, especially for older versions of the software. We saw a diminishing pool of resources coming, which is exactly why we started building a wide range of Siebel skillsets three years ago. As a collective team, our stable of professionals is fluent in all Siebel versions new and old and we have practical working knowledge of the greater Siebel architecture ecosystem. We help organizations keep their systems stable, secure, and interoperable with our unique blend of support, managed services, and consulting – regardless of the version they run, where they run it, its degree of customization, or to what it’s connected. Groundbreaking.

Q.  What are some of the toughest Siebel application challenges you’re team has resolved?

A.  My team has faced many complex challenges spanning a wide range of Siebel architectures. Our strategy and approach is the same every time. First, we gain an understanding of the problem or challenge through root cause analysis and familiarity with the environment and the teams involved. From there we can architect solutions that meet the technical needs of the Siebel stakeholders and the business needs of the business owners.

Our team has helped integrate Siebel with newer operating systems, different databases, middleware, and with third party or homegrown software products. We have developed solutions for server and user Interface issues when requirements have changed and helped roadmap and project manage version upgrades.

We have designed solutions to architecture challenges common in today’s IT infrastructure where one application needs software/browser X and another needs software/browser – even though the applications seemed incompatible, we made them work seamlessly together. We have helped identify when Siebel is not the root cause of the issue, but we don’t stop there.  We progress the issue outside of Siebel, often leading the charge to get to the right solution.

Q, Why should an enterprise running Siebel make the switch to Spinnaker Support?

  1.  Our groundbreaking vision and execution of the vision.
  2. Talented, customer-focused software engineers, who love working at Spinnaker Support.
  3. Unique, diverse range of services that can benefit virtually any organization that runs Siebel CRM.
  4. Worry-free.
  5. Financially strong, built to last.
  6. Litigation free, always doing our jobs the right way.

Q.  Wait Anthony. Why are you running off?

A.  I’ve got problems to solve and customers to delight. Thanks for taking the time to interview me.

Spinnaker Third Party Siebel CRM Support Services

Siebel is known throughout the industry for its stability, reliability, and comprehensiveness. Loyal Siebel users, who depend on Siebel to for their sales, marketing and commerce lines of business, have been subject to diminished support, and are limited by the solutions Oracle is willing to provide.

Spinnaker Support offers “Pure Play” third-party CRM solutions for Siebel users frustrated with Oracle’s lack of support. Not only does Spinnaker Support offer a top-notch software alternative, we offer it at a rate up to 60% lower than the competition. Get started with Spinnaker Support today.

Spinnaker Support Ups Investment in Israel

May 3, 2016 | Uzi Dvir | Israel Country Manager

The country of Israel continues to be a focus of continued investment for Spinnaker Support. As country manager, I am chartered to deliver world-class third-party support and managed services for Oracle and SAP enterprise applications. I am strategically expanding my local team of high-powered software engineers. Israel houses a deep pool of highly technical experts to choose from and I’m amassing a strong, versatile, and experienced group.

Israel consistently proves to be a forward-thinking country when it comes to advancing and incorporating technology. I was able to see this first hand at the recent STKI Summit, where Spinnaker Support participated as a sponsor. More than 1,500 C-level and senior management conference attendees, from Israel’s foremost companies, discussed the “State of IT.” Updates, major trends, and new developments were hot topics.

Many forward-thinking business people visited our booth. They are increasingly realizing that the old model of vendor-provided software support, developed by large ERP vendors some 30 years ago, is no longer optimal for their enterprises. Third-party support – concierge-level service for a fraction of the cost – is now seen as a viable alternative.

One company that has already made the switch to Spinnaker Support is Partner Communications Company, Ltd., one of Israel’s largest telecommunications companies. As part of the selection process, they conducted a 6-month head-to-head evaluation between Spinnaker Support and our fiercest rival. We won. Here’s what Raz Bartov, acting CIO at Partner Communications had to say:

“We have selected Spinnaker Support to provide ongoing support for our Oracle application landscape (Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, and Oracle Technology Stack). As the head-to-head evaluation progressed, it became crystal clear that Spinnaker Support is the best choice for Partner Communications Company Ltd. They provide an exceptionally high level of local support at an attractive price point and have quickly evolved into a natural extension of our own internal IT team. Spinnaker Support gives us great confidence going forward. They always do things the right way and consistently display in-depth Oracle application knowledge as pertains to our unique environment.”

Our investment in Israel is paying dividends as we grow to embrace the market demand.

Five Questions to Help Decide on an Upgrade

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

This advice may be a good general principle, but when it comes to databases, not so much. Yet we often hear it when it’s time to upgrade database software. Installing an upgrade may be a significant undertaking, so many people will take any excuse to avoid it. Don’t fall back on a cliché. Here’s how to decide whether to upgrade.

  1. What’s the upgrade supposed to accomplish? If the upgrade includes performance improvements, those could have a positive effect on your business. Performance enhancements could include reduced disk calls or improved compression, which might lead to energy or cost savings or an improved experience for your users. And if the upgrade includes security fixes, then it’s a no brainer. You don’t want the next big data breach story to be about your company. Go for the upgrade.
  1. What about new features? Only you can decide if the new features will contribute to your business. But I would advise you to consider new features with an out-of-the-box approach. Often a new feature can dramatically change your work processes in ways that aren’t apparent from reading the vendor’s promotional literature. Be open to the possibility that you could find better ways to get the work of your business accomplished. Try to reimagine your work processes in light of the new features.
  1. Where are you in the software’s life cycle? If the vendor is about to end support for the version you’re using, you should upgrade. Otherwise, you’re gambling with your database, which means you’re gambling with your business.
  1. How are your applications behaving? If your applications are giving you trouble, and you have reason to believe the upgrade will bring them in line, it’s time to upgrade.
  1. How long has the upgrade been out? Finally, my advice is to stay current without being obsessive. The computer industry has a long history of using its own customers for product testing. Even the biggest and best vendors can’t know how new software will behave in all user installations. Let everybody else test the upgrade for you. When it becomes available, wait for the first two patches before doing the upgrade yourself.

Once you’ve decided to upgrade, look for opportunities to do it when the systems aren’t so critical. This may have to do with the seasonality of your business or some change in your industry.

When you do upgrade, do it in a test environment first. Nine times out of ten you will catch critical issues. But don’t expect complete protection from this step, because that tenth time can blow up in your face. Always have a way back to where you started, meaning a complete backup and a written rollback plan.

I can tell you so many stories of customers who have tested a system in a development environment with no issues and still had critical issues when they went to the live environment. We even gained a customer this way. They came to us with an issue that should have been terminal and they had no backup to restore service. We were able to restore their systems with only three weeks of downtime. Three weeks represented tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue to our client. But with the business itself hanging in the balance, it could have been a lot worse.