Third party support

Have any of you used third party support like Rimini Street, NetCustomer or Tomorrow Now? I know tomorrow now has been shut down. What was your experience, if you have used one? What are the pros and cons of third party support?

Thanks
-Sam

Sam,

We used TomorrowNow. On the plus side, they were blindingly fast at picking up the phone when I placed a call or entered a ticket on line. For an on-line ticket, they called within a minute. The tech who helped us also got back very quickly and we always had a very experienced tech who could get right to work. Not like playing the escalation game I have to do with Oracle and others. All of the techs I spoke with were ex-JDE guys with years of experience.

On the downside, it locked us in to the service pack and froze our code. That's OK for six to twelve months. Get up to three years or so, and then things start getting difficult. Operating systems change, databases change, third party best of breed applications change. It's tough to keep those current when your service pack is frozen in time.

The other downside is being stuck in an old release. There may be benefits of a new release that being off Oracle support precludes you from. My company was out in the cold for three years, now we're back in the fold. As a CNC, I prefer being in the fold.

Gregg

Hi Sam,

We are current Tommorrownow customers. I found their support to be excellent.. they are supremely responsive. In fact I would say that being on oracle support is primarily advantageous in two fronts:

1) New code/ service packs
2) If you are new to the modules for functional support.

Oracle likes to overload a few good people with a million cases, and then their support suffers. They also don't really have a great deal of depth in some of their modules anymore and I think that's due to staff cuts and erosion. Being acquired - twice - doesn't help.

We are currently looking at moving to two different providers for our Siebel and JDE support. There are smaller shops than Rimini street, you might also want to look at them.

I understand a great deal of the JDE guys from TN are going to Spinnaker.

Morglum

If you are a World customer, the best support company is Versytec. I have been with them for 5 years and they are top notch. They only support World so if you are on any other software, you are out of luck. I highly recommend them.

Thanks Gregg and Morglum.

I am also worried about getting locked into service pack/tools release when system around you changes over time. We are a security conscious company so this may not be the right choice for us. I guess there are other players besides the one I mentioned. Can you please provide contacts of those smaller ones?

--Sam