Listen to this article
* – This article has been archived and is no longer updated by our editorial team –
Spinnaker Support helps organizations that run Oracle and SAP improve the quality of their ongoing enterprise application maintenance and support, while reducing maintenance fees by an average of 62%. These clients reduce costs and complexity, optimize application performance and interoperability, better manage security and vulnerability, and accelerate innovation and cloud migration.
Founded in 2008, Spinnaker Support has surfaced as the world’s leading provider of third-party support, managed services, and consulting. Nearly 1,000 clients spanning 104 countries leverage their unique blend of Oracle and SAP service offerings.
Below is our interview with Kurt Moydell, SVP of Spinnaker Support:
Q: Kurt, can you give us more insight into the third-party SAP and Oracle Support model?
A: For years, organizations that run Oracle and SAP have searched for an alternative application support model that improves service quality, reduces maintenance fees, and allows users to remain on their current software version until they’re ready to upgrade or migrate to something else.
Oracle and SAP have increasingly developed a self-support model, pushing their customers to use online sites to diagnose and resolve their own issues. Yet, maintenance fees are still on the rise. Support revenues yield about 90% gross margin for the mega-vendors, which is largely being used to innovate cloud applications. The forced march to immature offerings, and the relicensing fees assessed in such change, is a key driver behind consideration and adoption of third-party support. Our business is growing at a rapid pace (more than 40% per year). Gartner, the leading authority on the third-party support market, estimates that up to 10% of enterprises with more than $1 billion in revenue will leverage a third-party for their on-premises ERP technical maintenance and support by 2020. It’s a high-demand driven market to say the least.
Q: What type of enterprises are adopting third-party SAP and Oracle support?
A: We are signing companies of all sizes, mostly Fortune 500 and mid-market. These enterprises span the gamut of industries from private to public sector. Active clients are segmented as follows: manufacturing (57%), services (23%), consumer and retail (12%), and public sector (8%). Our geographic reach is steadily expanding. North America remains our largest market but Europe and Asia-Pacific are growing fast. This year we formally launched into Korea, Russia, and the Middle East. We hold a leadership position in these emerging markets and are anticipating significant on-going growth.
Recommended: Executive Search Partners – The Only IT Focused Search Company Founded And Run By Ex CIO’s
Q: Why do companies switch to third-party support?
A: Companies make the move to get more comprehensive, responsive service for a fraction of the cost. The third-party model is dramatically different from the 30-year old model deployed by the software mega-vendors. We average eight-minute response to high priority issues. The first call is answered by a highly experienced, dedicated engineer who manages a named team of engineers – who were hand-picked to support each unique client. Each team provides “full-stack” support, diagnosing the application(s) and surrounding technologies to resolve critical issues and to keep them running at peak performance. We support both standard and customized code and cover break fixes, tax and regulatory updates, and security and vulnerability threat issues. Clients also benefit from our range of technology advisory services, helping ensure their applications continuously remain interoperable and secure, despite business process and technology stack changes.
In our early years, most new clients were in some state of financial pressure, needing to cut costs. Later, more companies began to migrate from one application suite to another and wanted support during the transition. Today, increasingly more organizations are are making the strategic decision to sustain their on-premise systems using third-party support as they plan and act upon their digital transformation roadmaps. The forced march to vendor cloud is frustrating SAP and Oracle users, many of whom believe that offerings won’t be ready for years. Not only does Spinnaker Support offer a lifetime support policy but the dramatic savings we afford are helping fund and accelerate the digital innovation journeys of our clients.
Q: What products do you support?
A: We support a wide range of applications: For Oracle, we cover E-Business Suite, Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, Oracle Retail, Hyperion, Siebel CRM, JD Edwards, ATG Web Commerce, and more. For SAP, we support >130 products from the SAP Business Suite, Business Objects, HANA Database, and the Oracle Runtime Database. Well versed on older, newer, and even emerging Oracle and SAP applications, our engineers help clients more proficiently navigate from on-premise to hybrid to cloud.
We are ISO 9001:2015 certified and in the final steps of ISO 27001 certification, have won many customer service awards (including the prestigious 2017 Gold Stevie award), and our clients are 99.6% satisfied (per the 2017 customer satisfaction survey).
Recommended: Q: Are there other competitive advantages you bring to market?
A: Yes. We remain the only third-party support provider to deliver application and technology managed services, and consulting services. These services are offered stand-alone or blended. More than 30% of our worldwide client base has leveraged two or more of our three primary service offerings. They benefit in numerous ways from having a single vendor that delivers this rare combination of services.
We are widely regarded and trusted as the smart choice for organizations switching to third-party support. Spinnaker Support has always delivered service the right way, respecting the intellectual property rights of others and not taking shortcuts that compromise our customers’ relation with their software vendor. When operational, financial, and legal risk profiles are important considerations, Spinnaker Support is the undisputed smart, safe third-party support choice.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: When we look at the future, we don’t overlook our past. We are the fastest growing third-party support and managed services company in the world, yet we have remained profitable for 36 consecutive quarters. Strong financial health and balance means that we can continue to grow our customer service capabilities around the world, hiring best-in-class engineers to widen our value proposition across the entire technology stack.
We will strengthen our service capabilities in existing target markets and strategically extend our geographic reach. Expect to see us add to our nine regional operations centers going forward. We have and will continue to expand our array of service offerings, always listening to the voice of our clients to anticipate where they are going and what services they will most need going forward. We will continue to scale to meet demand in the fast-growing world of SAP and Oracle technology support and managed services.
