Postmodern ERP strategies: Independent Support

Gartner has been talking about "postmodern ERP" for a couple of years now:

"Businesses looking to improve administration today can take advantage of lower costs, better functional fit and process flexibility offered by blending cloud applications with on-premises applications in what we now refer to as ‘postmodern ERP.’"

In SAP Nation 2.0 I expanded the definition to showcase 9 customer strategies to modernize their ERP backbone.  Over the next few days I will excerpt some of the strategies.

An increasingly common strategy is Independent Support, or Third Party Maintenance

Gartner reports it is seeing a steady increase in inquiries about cancelling maintenance agreements with ERP vendors. This is certainly a popular strategy with many SAP customers and many are seeking "third party maintenance" from providers like Rimini Street. Such independent providers promise "a higher level of service, no required upgrades and annual support fee savings of 50 percent."

Rimini says it now has over 150 SAP customers under contract, representing over $100 billion in revenues. Most customers look at independent support for cost savings. However, many customers also find attractive the 30-minute guaranteed response for urgent issues, highly personalized service from what Rimini calls a Primary Support Engineer (PSE), support for customizations at no additional charge and the ability to run the existing SAP release with a promise of 15 years with no required upgrades.

While the book focused on SAP scenarios, the same can be applied to many other ERP environments. More excerpts over the next few days.