Matt Stava | CEO & Chairman
I am very proud to announce today that Dobler Consulting is merging with Spinnaker Support. We’ve been working on this strategic acquisition for some time, and while you can read about the basics in our press release, I wanted to share my personal thoughts on why this is important to our customers, Dobler’s customers, and the overall service and support market.
What This Acquisition Means for Spinnaker Support
Dobler Consulting is a database management and information technology services firm that has been a business partner of ours for the past few years. They are extremely well known and well regarded in the database world, in particular for SAP Sybase (ASE) managed services. Much like us, they provide a broad spectrum of world-class solutions to SMBs and Fortune 500 companies in various industries.
The Dobler team adds a wealth of database experience to our ranks. This includes products we already support – Sybase, Oracle DB, operating systems – and new practices like Microsoft SQL Server and No-SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) databases. Their Level 3 and 4 engineers have just as much accumulated experience as ours, and their talents will strengthen our existing practices.
Our current customers will benefit from this added capability and from the new practices. For those who are looking to migrate away from SAP and Oracle, this means we can assist in new ways throughout the migration cycle.
Dobler customers will see no change to their service and will have the same engineers, expertise, and outstanding service at their disposal. Dobler’s two executives will join our management team, Peter Dobler as VP, Data Engineering and Raju Chidanbaram as VP, Managed Services. I welcome their leadership experience and personal passion for the services market.
How This Fits into Our Long-Term Strategy
We know from Gartner that the third-party support market has continued to grow with an average net new sales of 30% over the past five years. Our strategy has always been to expand with the market, as evidenced by our record growth, increased staffing and leadership, enhanced services, and even our new office in Sydney, Australia.
With the acquisition of Dobler, we become the premier provider of Sybase support, managed services, and consulting – no one in our market has more experience. In fact, I believe that we become unmatched in our market for ALL database support and services. As I noted earlier, the merger also allows us to deliver an even wider range of database technical services – Microsoft SQL Server and NoSQL databases – to our global customers.
By combining forces, we have increased our customer base and global presence, strengthened our existing practices, and expanded the services and skills we provide. The merger more than triples our managed services staff, a distinct advantage to customers who prefer to work with a single service provider.
In addition, we will be able to improve how we communicate with customers through the SpectrumDB 360 Dashboard, Dobler’s data warehouse and reporting tool for gathering and organizing customer data. SpectrumDB 360, combined with other innovations under development, will allow us to provide any customer with a comprehensive overview of their database environment(s) and real-time reporting on service records.
How This Aligns with Our Values and Reputation
Spinnaker Support is grounded by the belief that customers deserve comprehensive services at a fair price. Our reputation rests on our flexibility, dependability, and deep bench of subject matter experts. We talk about “supportive support” a lot, and the sad truth is that not all vendors in the market are as focused on customer satisfaction as they are on shareholder gain.
The Dobler leadership and team share our core values: responsiveness, accountability, transparency, and integrity. They get it. Dobler operates in a similar fashion, with established processes, a flexible contracting approach, and an emphasis on hiring the most capable engineers. We both believe that the customer comes first, and we take our role as trusted advisors very seriously.
I’m always glad to speak with individuals, journalists, and analysts about this merger or other topics. Feel free to reach out for a conversation.
