Courtesy of Sadagopan, I saw this TomorrowNow analysis. TomorrowNow provides limited third party maintenance services for PeopleSoft and JDE products and was acquired by SAP earlier in the year. As I have written before their PeopleSoft and Siebel acquisitions could fall apart if several customers decided to stop buying maintenance from Oracle - so SAP can needle Oracle with this offering.
By why stop at Oracle products? Why not offer SAP customers similar services. SAP customers fall in to a bell curve. Several are mature and not likely to need new upgrades any time soon - if ever. Many others are in early implementation mode and do not need a lot of maintenance support. Yet SAP charges 17% without segmenting its customer base. A few years ago SAP used to be much more reasonable and allowed new users to ramp up to the full rate as they got close to going live. Now it expects 17% from day one - and when pushed uses some "revenue recognition" excuse as the justification.
TomorrowNow could offer SAP services a limited maintenance offering at say half the rate. Absent this, SAP is encouraging its customers to look for 3rd party support. Just because you buy a BMW does not mean you have to keep going back to the authorized dealer for every premium priced service. The one price fits all maintenance pricing strategy has been broken for a while and TomorrowNow provides a platform for SAP ( and other enterprise vendors with comparable offerings) to rethink this.
