April 19, 2017

April 19, 2017 | Karen Blazek | Director, Product Marketing

The author of this blog is Karen Blazek, who just joined Spinnaker Support as a Director of Product Marketing. Previously, Karen spent the last 15 years in leadership roles within Oracle’s application support organization. Most recently, Karen’s team worked to drive upgrades and migrations from legacy applications to Oracle’s latest application and technology releases.

Now is the time to investigate the benefits of third-party maintenance and support, especially since Oracle is no longer publishing dates of future major releases from JD Edwards. With questionable future investment in JD Edwards from Oracle and no promise of a new release, this is an optimal time to move off of Oracle support maintenance.  Companies have long been frustrated by the constant push to stay on the latest releases churned out by Oracle. Annual IT budgets are exhausted on the constant upgrade cycle, as you are “forced” by Oracle to stay on fully supported releases. Did you know that Oracle achieves over 90% profit margins on your support dollars? Not many other organizations in a competitive environment can achieve higher than 90% profit margins. What are your support dollars really paying for?

Fact:  Oracle’s support model is based on customer self-service. Companies are shelling out excess amounts on maintenance fees to resolve issues on their own.

Fact:  Oracle’s support focus is on Service Request time to resolution, not customer satisfaction. Support engineer’s performance is not only based on how fast they can close a Service Request, but also how many they can close each month.

Fact:  Oracle support will NOT support your custom modifications.

Fact:  Oracle delivers patches on a scheduled release cycle. You have to wait for your fixes and there is no guarantee that your issue will even be looked at. You are continuously asked to apply the latest electronic software update (ESU), prior to support even troubleshooting the issue. And, if a BUG is identified, it will most likely only be delivered in the latest release.

Paradigm Shift in the Way You Think About Oracle Support

So why should you look at Spinnaker Support for your JD Edwards software maintenance? The most obvious reason relates to the huge cost savings in annual maintenance fees, average annual cost savings of 62%. We do recognize there is a “paradigm shift” that you as a customer need to make when considering third-party support. It’s more than just a replacement of your vendor support, it is a different way of thinking about support.

Benefits outlined below, should be even more compelling:

  • Spinnaker Support is concierge support not self-service support offered by Oracle.
    • At Oracle, a critical service request can sit in an automation ‘hold’ pattern for up to 7 days and never be assigned to an engineer. Waiting for you to upload multiple files or logs that may not even be relevant to your issues.
    • Oracle’s published SLAs only apply to the initial response due time requirements. After the initial response is met, it may be days or weeks before you hear back from your assigned support engineer.
    • Oracle’s global service request handoffs drive little to no issue ownership and resolution.
  • Spinnaker Support assigns a Named Account Support Lead (ASL) to serve as the single business/commercial point of contact, beginning with the onboarding process and continuing throughout the life of the contract. You will be working on a regular basis with a dedicated team of support engineers that know your environments and your personal preferences.
  • Full support for modifications. Spinnaker Support will troubleshoot and support your custom code along with developing new customizations to meet your future business needs.
  • You need to understand the benefits of Spinnaker Support’s Archive*. Spinnaker Support creates for you, an archive of upgrades and patches supplied to you by Oracle prior to the end of your support contract. As a separate work stream during the onboarding process, we perform the archiving process for you. Your archiving team works in concert with the dedicated customer support team during onboarding to ensure you have all fix packs available for future need and help ensure that your archive only contains what you’re legally entitled to retain.

*This is an offering that Rimini Street is no longer allowed to provide for their customers under Oracle’s Cease and Desist letter.

At COLLABORATE 17, Oracle announced a 10 year premier support policy, but only for E1 9.2 and World A9.4. With little future investment in JD Edwards from Oracle and no promise of a new release, there is no risk in moving away from Oracle support maintenance. You have full rights and access to all software that is available today. Spinnaker Support has a no “sunset” support policy, meaning that its customers can stay on their current products for as long as those products fit the customers’ businesses. We currently support customers with application and technical architectures well over 20 years old. Break free of your software vendors’ restrictive annual support contract, and put your savings to work on other IT projects.

Contact me today! I worked for Oracle for nearly 20-years in the JD Edwards support organization and would love to help explain the benefits of switching to third-party maintenance and support from Spinnaker Support.