February 07, 2019

February 7, 2019 | Larry Goldman | Senior Director, Product Marketing

Happy 2019…or, if you’re a procurement, sourcing, or vendor management professional, maybe not so happy.  

Never before has there been so much pressure to identify solution providers that help your company innovate, scale, and transform. You are challenged to improve the customer experience and to facilitate the transition to evolving technologies, with an eye on optimizing cost and improving speed to adoption. It’s a tall order. 

And don’t underestimate how the cloud is changing business as we know it. Most on-premise enterprise software that has helped shape today’s businesses will inevitably be migrated to the cloud. But not all of it, and not just yet. While edge applications like CRM and HCM are now moving fast to the cloud, the stable, highly customized core ERPs are not. Gartner and other leading authorities predict that these systems of record have another five to ten years of on-premise life. 

As companies drive to the cloud, third-party support adoption is skyrocketing. Of the many options in the market place, third-party Oracle or SAP software support has become increasingly embraced due to high service level and value. It is an ideal way to prolong the life of on-premise enterprise software and for dramatic cost savings that can be redirected to fund tomorrow’s cloud-based replacement solutions. 

New White Paper

To help sort this all out, we’ve published, “Building the Case for Third-Party SAP and Oracle Support,” a guide designed to help procurement, sourcing, and vendor management professionals understand and build the internal case for switching to third-party support. All while efficiently driving the due diligence and decision-making processes.  

This paper answers these pressing questions: 

  1. What is the third-party support market? 
  2. How can you quickly determine if third-party support is right for your organization? 
  3. How do you build a business case, compare software vendor support against third-party support, and to compare the leading third-party support vendors? 
  4. Who are the internal stakeholders to assemble and how can you drive alignment? 
  5. What are your existing software license, support agreement, and support cancellation rights? 
  6. How can you counter the inevitable roadblocks from Oracle and SAP? 
  7. How can you counter the likely internal IT staff concerns? 
  8. How can third-party support enable and accelerate the best cloud migration paths? 
  9. How can you smoothly transition to third-party support? 

Third-party support is not for every company, but every company should investigate it. In your procurement role, we hope you will benefit from the tips provided therein. Download the paper today.