Spinnaker Nabs More JD Edwards Customers, Unveils Siebel Support Service

July 16, 2013 Alex Woodie

Spinnaker Support recently announced two new customers for its third-party support service for JD Edwards World, including D+M Group, a manufacturer of speakers and stereos, and an unnamed Las Vegas casino. The Denver, Colorado, company also announced the launch of a new support program for Siebel CRM customers.

Spinnaker continues to capitalize on the pushback against the expensive fees that Oracle and SAP charge for maintenance and technical support. Oracle charges customers an annual fee of about 22 percent to get support and upgrades, while SAP recently jacked its annual fee to 19 percent.

Oracle has given JD Edwards World customers other reasons to consider third-party maintenance services such as Spinnaker’s. For starters, in December it will end mainstream support for A7.3 and A8.1. Those releases are closely tied to i5/OS V5R4, although not 100 percent dependent. Oracle wants those customers to upgrade to the current World A9.3 release of the ERP system. The kicker is that World A9.3 only runs on IBM i 7.1, and not all World shops are ready to make the move.

IBM, of course, wants everybody off V5R4, but relented in May, when it launched three years of extended support for the OS. Oracle hasn’t made a similar move with World A7.3 and A8.1.

A separate but related issue concerns the Vertex Payroll Tax L Series (PTL) package that Oracle has embedded in World releases A7.3 to A9.2. Under this partnership, Vertex is responsible for keeping World’s payroll functions up to date with laws and regulations.

The problem is that Vertex will stop supporting PTL in December 2013, in conjunction with the end of mainstream support for those ERP packages. Oracle’s solution for JDE World shops is (you guessed it) to upgrade to World A9.3, which includes the newer Vertex’s Payroll Tax Q Series (PTQ) product.

Spinnaker addressed the Vertex payroll issue back in November when it announced an integrator product that lets those older versions of World run with the newer version of the Vertex tax software. The company says it expects to have 100 customers of its Vertex integrator software by the end of 2013.

The Vertex integration is what brought the major Vegas casino group into the Spinnaker fold. Spinnaker says the casino (which didn’t want its name used but is one of the big ones on the Strip, we’re told) had already ended its Oracle support agreement, and had been a customer of Rimini Street, Spinnaker’s primary competitor in the third-party support business for JD Edwards, Oracle, and SAP products. Rimini hadn’t solved the Vertex payroll issue, so the casino group made the leap over to Spinnaker, the company says.

The other major customer announcement involves D+M, the manufacturer of Denon, Marantz, and Boston Acoustics brand of speakers and stereo equipment. The company signed an agreement with Spinnaker in September 2012 to receive support for its SAP ECC 6 application. The company says the deal with Spinnaker is expected to save $3 million over five years.

Then in October 2012, D+M signed a “co-sourcing” agreement with Spinnaker for its JD Edwards World A9.1 environment. In March 2013, it signed up for maintenance as well. “We feel confident that we have the right partner to ensure the stability of our SAP and JD Edwards environments,” Christoph Hesterbrink, vice president of global IS applications and business systems for D+M Group, said in a press release.

The last bit of news out of Spinnaker came last week, when the company announced that it’s now providing third-party support services for Oracle’s Siebel CRM application. The company says it can save Siebel customers up to 70 percent of the cost they’re currently paying Oracle for Siebel maintenance services. The company is supporting Siebel version 7.5 and up.

Spinnaker’s competitor Rimini also provides third-party Siebel services. It also supports several other enterprise software packages that Spinnaker doesn’t, including PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite, Oracle database, Hyperion, and BusinessObjects.