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Third Party Support Market in Transition |
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Written by Brent Martin
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
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It’s a typical day at Acme Worldwide Enterprises. An Application Engine job bombs out when posting items. The analyst finds a problem with the code and notifies Oracle support, who tells him that it’s fixed in Bundle #17. The analyst hangs up the phone and sighs. They’re only current through bundle #6.
The analyst approaches his manager and tells her what he found. The manager realizes that this will be a big impact to the shared service group that’s responsible for testing the application. Applying so many bundles at once will require compare reports, re-applying customizations, and full regression testing of every module. She asks the analyst to see what it’ll take to develop their own one-off fix to get their otherwise stable application working again.
The manager then turns back to the task at hand – the next year’s budget. She’s just been notified by Oracle that the license fees are increasing yet again – which means the annual support cost, calculated as a percentage of license fees, will be increasing as well. This will be a tough sell. The CFO already doesn’t understand why support is so expensive for an application that’s been live and stable for two years now. The CIO will question why they should pay more per year going forward since the emphasis is on ROI and they don’t plan to upgrade for several years -- if ever. After all, Software as a Service and Open Source solutions are all on the table. But getting the periodic regulatory updates requires support. What can she do?
According to Punita Pandey, CEO of netCustomer, Inc. , this is a scenario that happens all too often. And there is a solution. We give customers an alternative path to paying high maintenance fees. If customers don’t want to upgrade and have a stable application, we provide 24X7 technical support and regulatory updates, both customized to customer-specific requirements. Most customers can save at least 50%, and some up to 75% on maintenance fees with netCustomer. netCustomer customers get customized support. When a customer needs a fix, they don’t get a huge bundle of fixes to apply; they just get a custom fix for the single issue. They only get what they need. It’s the same thing for regulatory updates. And we assist customers through testing process. We help with customization troubleshooting as well. Many issues have little to do with the core product, but with customizations.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 06 May 2008 )
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Changing PeopleSoft Admin Passwords |
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Written by Brent Martin
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Thursday, 17 April 2008 |
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One of the scariest things you can do is to change a password for one of your system accounts in a production environment. Your boss and users think it’s no big deal. Only you know how many places passwords need to be changed in the application. And if you don’t change each one and bounce the different components in the right order you’ll screw it up and look like a total idiot. Not that I’ve ever screwed it up. Primarily because I’m a consultant and changing passwords is nothing you want to pay a consultant to do. Yes, I like being a consultant. But I feel for all of you non-consultants out there, so I’ll list all of the places I’d change and you people who actually do change passwords let me know if I did it correctly or if I’d have some explaining to do:
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Written by Brent Martin
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Friday, 08 February 2008 |
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As you may have noticed, I've launched a new PeopleSoft forum. The topic areas are currently a General Discussion forum and a Job Posting forum. I hope you'll check it out. I didn't launch it because I think we need another PeopleSoft Forum. IT Toolbox Forum and Yahoo PeopleSoft Fans forum seem to have plenty of traffic and generate lots of good questions and answers. It's just that a blog is a very one-way communication vehicle. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- I enjoy writing about what I know and avoiding what I don't. And when users comment, it's always regarding an article I've written so questions are relatively easy to answer. But I do get a lot of personal e-mail messages asking specific questions, and one of my posts was hijacked and turned into Q&A forum. So instead of handling these questions in an ad-hoc basis, I decided to address them in a forum so everybody can benefit. Another thing I hope to get is a better sense of what's really on the PeopleSoft Community's mind -- at least the part of the PS community that visits my web site. Since my current contract will be terminating in the near future, job opportunities are on my mind so I decided to add the job opportunity section. I plan on purging this section every 30-60 days so that the jobs stay current. You don't have to register as a user to use the forum, but I think you'll find your experience will be better if you do. I'm using a new forum product called FireBoard that integrates with Joomla, the open source Content Management Software that powers my web site. I like the features it provides -- especially the RSS feed and automatic e-mail notifications for specific threads. But it is a bit new so if you find any blatant errors or performance problems please let me know.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 13 December 2008 )
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