Re: RE: Rimini Street and other 3rd Party support for E1
Its definitely a "It depends" type of situation, which the business owners don't like to hear. But due to that I don't think a blanket statement is fair.
Since upgrading to 8.9 (Don't laugh) from Xe while still on Oracle support I believe the total amount of ESU's I used were 4, one or two were related to the planner, and there was one for the deployment server when it was upgraded to win 2003 server.The other 300+ modifications I wrote myself.
We use another company like rimini as a help desk, and I find it worthwhile. You have to remember that geographically - not everyone has access to good consultants!. When I was with JDE in a consulting role, I recall going to one site on the east coast of Canada and they remarked that I was the first consultant to visit in literally years.
In terms of specialized knowledge you can also get help with doing your own development as this company (and probably rimini) have developers who you can discuss your own code, best BSFN's, etc. There are minefields you have to watch out for - our management and legal agreed that the third party support would only view our screens via webex type screens, no logs, and we would not use or request any code to be developed from them.
We're a fairly small shop, 30 or so users, multi currency, multi language, several remote networks in europe, one main site with mixed web and windows clients. As your needs increase, the possibility of going off vendor support could decline, unless you have enough experienced developers and have solved any annual procedures.
There is certainly a point in time where the returns decline, however. Just before we went off support the most important task I did was to work with other people in the IT department to upgrade our OS's, databases, websphere, etc, to the highest level possible that was supported with our service pack. What I expected to happen - and has begun to happen - is that some of our technologies have become so out of date that they are no longer officially supportable, notably Oracle. This leads to some friction as other members of IT want to modernize and I literally can't guarantee a stable system if we move out of the MTR's (Or whatever they are called now). You can also easily run into trouble with third party tools - Vertex, Createform, etc.We've been ok in the short term but within a year or two I'm going to push harder for an upgrade. Your mileage may vary.
Morglum