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Posts Tagged ‘user event’

Event Report: Customers Very Happy At Ultimate Connections 2013 (#ulticonnect)

Published on March 29, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Partnership Announcements Enhance Ultimate Software’s Offerings

Amidst a crowd of 1500 customers, partners, and attendees, Ultimate Software held their annual gathering from March 12th to March 15th, 2013 in Las Vegas. Geared towards the medium sized to enterprise markets, Ultimate Software has steadily taken market share from ADP for payroll and expanded out into operational and strategic human capital management (HCM) capabilities. New mobile access, generation 4 cloud architecture, and timeline features for employee’s highlight Ultimate’s growing ambitions and customer requirements.

At the event, Ultimate announced two strategic partnerships that bode well for customers and prospects facing an increasing level of customer complexity and growing need for global capabilities:

Celergo partnership adds global payroll capabilities to internationalization efforts. Celergo’s founder and CEO, Michele Honomichl, and Adam Rogers announced on stage global payroll services support for 110 countries and the ability to process payroll in over 150 countries. In addition, Ultimate’s Spring and Fall 2013 release of the flagship UltiPro includes support for 28 country specific localizations such as Australia, Brazil, China, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, and Thailand. Other key features include, global compensation management, localized compliance for data and employee privacy rules, and additional language translations.

Point of View (POV): Ultimate’s customers operate in 144 countries. As organizations follow the growth overseas, the global payroll connector and Celergo partnership gives mid market and enterprise customers a competitive option as they expand their presence abroad and usage of UltiPro. These proactive steps to address global capabilities now, provide a key differentiation among potential competitors and places Ultimate Software in a potential position of international expansion.

Informatica partnership paves the way for future cloud partnerships. At the conference, Informatica announced a self-service solution for HCM data connections. Built on top of UltiPro Carrier Network (UCN), customers have access to over 100 packaged connectors to benefits carriers and third party solutions.

(POV): Customers and prospects do not want to worry about integration of their employee records or people management solutions with medical, dental, vision, and other benefits providers. In the long term, customers seek worry free integration platforms to third party applications, cloud ecosystems, and mobile ecosystems. The partnership with Informatica solves the needs of complex integration scenarios and Ultimate customers do not pay for the integration tool. However, customers who are looking for a lower cost integration solution for non-UCN endpoints may want to consider more cost-effective offerings for more point to point integration scenarios.

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Event Report: Microsoft Dynamics Convegence 2013 (#conv13)

Published on March 19, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Customer Success, Acquisition, And New Features Drive Day 1 Headlines

Almost 12,000 Microsoft faithful converged in New Orleans for the flagship Dynamics event. Wayne Morris (@WayneMorrisOz), CVP kicked off the event reiterating the theme of “A World Ahead”. Meanwhile, Kirill Tatarinov (@KirillTatarinov), President of Microsoft Business Solutions Division, led the session with a series of impressive brands and compelling customer success stories. Highlights from the day include:

Impressive Global 2000 customer wins. Kirill hinted at wins at SpaceX and followed with live customer presentations from ShockDoctor, Chobani, Weightwatchers, and Revlon. Dennis Goetz (CFO) of Shock Doctor shared how they grew their business moving away from spreadsheets to Microsoft Dynamics GP. Maureen Hurley (VP of IT) and James McConeghy (CFO) explained how Chobani installed Microsoft Dynamics AX in their main New York plant in less than a year and then implemented Dynamics AX at a new plant in less than 27 days. Christine Butler (VP of CRM and Business Development, and Loic Vienne (VP of Systems) at WeightWatchers discussed how they put in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage with 500 million customer touch points a year. David Giambruno (SVP and CIO) and Steven Berns (Executive VP and CFO) of Revlon, made the impressive move to consolidate 21 ERP systems into one on Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Point of View (POV): The Microsoft Dynamics team has successfully moved up market from a previously SMB centric message. The rise of global 2000 customers in the $500M to $5B revenue range shows the growing presence, success, and scalability of Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM. Though the business is estimated to bring $1.4B in revenue, Microsoft Dynamics still represents a small fraction of Microsoft’s overall revenue ($73.72B 2012). However, success in the Microsoft Dynamics business improves attach rates and cross-sells into Sharepoint, Office, SQL Server, and Azure. Microsoft’s small investment in Dynamics reduces customer fragmentation and plays a key role in long-term growth.

Acquisition of Netbreeze for social analytics. The Netbreeze acquisition brings data mining, natural language processing (NLP), and text analysis to social signals such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, 6,000 online news websites, 500,000 message boards, and 18M blogs. The system supports 28 different languages including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Direct language translation beats translation back to one language.

Point of View (POV): Netbreeze and Marketing Pilot address a growing need among the customer base for marketing automation and management. Netbreeze is key to merging both the structured CRM information and the unstructured social signals. As the CMO role continues to reclaim its technology destiny, we are moving away from transaction integrity and moving towards surfacing insights. Netbreeze provides insight into marketing spend effectivity.

Announcement of Marketing Pilot 15. MarketingPilot 15 adds improved user experience and analytics. In addition, the long awaited connector to Microsoft Dynamics CRM arrives on March 2013. International general availability is planned for later 2013.

(POV): Marketing Pilot provides core marketing capabilities that were missing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Customers seeking an integrated marketing solution should consider Marketing Pilot. However, the technology platform is dated. For those customers seeking a cloud based approach, Silverpop, InfusionSoft, Aprimo, and Marketo may serve as better alternative today. Compared to CMS marketing products like SiteCore or Adobe CQ, Marketing Pilot remains a distant second in features, but a top contender when cost is considered.

Windows Azure partner hosted offerings for ERP. Partner hosting for Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 will be available in June 2013. Dynamics AX will see an Azure hosted version in 2014.

(POV): Among the Dynamics ERP customers, partner hosting remains a popular option for dipping their toes into cloud ERP. A key barrier to Azure hosting has been the performance issues with SQL Server for Azure. Resolution of those issues will free Dynamics to deploy more of its capabilities in Azure. The go forward architectural model for Dynamics AX resembles Dynamics CRM where a VM is assigned per tenant but all management is done by Microsoft.

New mobile applications for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. New mobile apps will address key horizontal functions such as expense management, time tracking, and approvals. The expense management offering will capture and reconcile expenses, time allows the completion of time sheets, and approvals allows managers to complete business requests. Microsoft intends to support Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, Windows Phone 8, Android phones, and iOS phone devices

(POV): Customers are increasingly asking for a mobile experience. The move to address mobility focuses on “in-between time” tasks that improve productivity for employees and bolsters offerings for services based industries and public sector.

Figure 1. Ongoing #Conv13 Flickr Stream

The Bottom Line: Progression In The Dynamics Product Line Results In A Competitive Alternative For Customers

On December 21, 2000, Microsoft announced the intention to acquire Great Plains. In July 2002, Microsoft bought Navision A/S, the foundation of Dynamics NAV and AX. Until 2007, Microsoft Business Solutions had struggled to find and grow beyond its SMB niche. Over the past seven years, the team has focused on deepening vertical capabilities, improved integration with Microsoft components, expanding partner programs, and making strategic acquisitions for product and technology features. The process has been slow but steady but increased investment in Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM has paid off.

Fast forward to 2013, Microsoft now has a strong portfolio of solutions that Global 2000 organizations can deploy with confidence. The MBS team is not afraid of tuck in acquisitions nor purchasing common IP from trusted partners. The rearchitecture efforts and gradual hosted capabilities have helped move the product forward. Consequently, customers and prospects seeking a newer architecture, Microsoft footprint, and deeper micro-vertical capabilities now consider the core Dynamics products for both ERP and CRM in short lists. Key use cases include the consolidation of ERP, move to Two-Tier ERP, and primary CRM system of record. However, customers should be cautioned that success will require selection of the right Microsoft Partner. Selection of the right partner is never an easy process as many partners exist and validation of capabilities still remains a challenge for prospects and existing customers.

Your POV

Are you Microsoft Dynamics customer? Do you plan to invest more or less with them in 2013? What do you think about their strategy? Are you ready to consolidate on Microsoft? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org or R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com

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Resources and Related Research

Event Report: The Sentiment At Microsoft Convergence 2011

Friday’s Feature: Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010

Research Report: Microsoft Partners – Before Adopting Azure, Understand the 12 Benefits And Risks

Monday’s Musings: The Hidden Value In SaaS Deployments

Trends: 2011 Cloud Computing Predictions For CIO’s And Business Technology Leaders

Research Summary: Best Practices – The Case For Two-Tier ERP

Tuesday’s Tip: When To Go With A Two-Tier ERP Strategy

Strategy: 5 Lessons Learned From A Decade Of Naught

Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud And SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010

Tuesday’s Tip: 2010 Apps Strategies Should Start With Business Value

Best Practices: Lessons Learned In What SMB’s Want From Their ERP Provider

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Monday’s Musings: Trends In The Top Software Insider Posts of 2012 (#softwareinsider)

Published on January 3, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Thank You For Your Support

SoftwareInsider.org generated almost 10 million page views in 2012 (see Figure 1). This does not include syndication through Constellation Research, Forbes (discontinued in 2012), Enterprise Irregulars, Computerworld UK, and other great media partners.

Figure 1. Software Insider Achieved 9.8M Page Views for 2012

Classic Posts Address The Key Fundamentals In The Disruptive Technology Shift

Four posts have made the all time favorite list and address the 5 consumer technology forces that influence enterprise software.

2012 Top 40 Reflects A Broader Shift To Business Outcomes And Technology Adoption

Analyst Relations and the World of Influence - The top blog post of 2013 discussed the future of the industry analyst versus legacy analyst firms.

1. Event Report: IIAR UK Forum – The Future of the Industry Analyst (Legacy vs Disruptive)

Consumerization of Technology and The New C-Suite – The impact of technology on the C-suite has never been greater. As business strategy relies more on technology, CMOs, CFOs, and other line of business heads can expect to work more closely with the CIOs and CTOs.

7. Trends: The Battle For CMO Mind Share

13. Monday’s Musings: Why Are Innovative CIOs Betting Less On Cloud And Virtualization?

21. Monday’s Musings: Understand the Four Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption

22. Quark Summary: What CFO’s Need To Know About SaaS And Cloud Integration

25.Quark Summary: What Every CMO Needs To Know About The Five C’s of Customer Engagement

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Event Report: IFS World Conference 2012 – Innovations Abound Beyond ERP (#IFSWoCo2012)

Published on October 15, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Key Themes Include Mobility, User Experience, and Innovation

Over 1100 IFS customers convened October 15th to 17th, 2012 in Gothenburg Sweden for the IFS World Conference. The conference brought together the world of projects, service and asset, manufacturing, and supply chain. The conference highlighted the:

Massive move to mobile. IFS continued their push into their mobile apps portfolio with seven touch apps. Martin Gunnarsson director of research and development, discussed how the mobile solution addresses three personas: casual, professional, and transactional. IFS Time Tracker addresses project time and attendance reporting, confirmation, etc. IFS Trip Tracker simplifies travel expense reporting. IFS Sales Companion helps sales professionals manage their accounts, tasks and opportunities. IFS Quick Reports provide the ability to create and view ad-hoc reports on a mobile device. IFS Quick Facts enables fast keyword search of any object in IFS Applications. IFS Flight Log allows the management of platform operational data in the aerospace and defense industry. IFS Support Companion delivers interaction with IFS support centers.

Point of view (POV): The move to mobile continues the user experience emphasis of IFS. These new Touch Apps address specific work processes and allow for quick to complete tasks. By calling on services running inside IFS Cloud, users gain direct access without having to talk to the ERP back end. IFS should be lauded for support of the three key mobile apps ecosystems: Google Play Store, Apple App Store and Windows Marketplace. pushing out to public apps stores provides customers with an easy and frictionless experience. Customers and prospects can expect more touch apps to address areas in CRM, HR, reporting, search, and projects in 2013.

Launch customers on IFS Applications 8. Customers on hand at the conference provided upfront honesty of the migration to IFS Applications 8Early adopters, Remmele Engineering, Portsmouth Aviation, VBG Group, Bright Point, and Teracom shared insights on their move to IFS Applications 8. Some customers moved from IFS 2003, others from IFS 7.5. Right now 40% of the customer base has made the move to 7.5 or 8. IFS has 34000 users are live or implementing and expect 25 customers by year end to be live on IFS applications 8.

(POV): The different release paths, industries, and use cases reinforced the marketing messages that the move to IFS Applications 8 was worth the trouble. Customers cite the user experience, business intelligence, and the move to mobility as the key reasons for the shift. Regulatory compliance and new industry specific features also played a significant role. More…

Event Report: The Day 0 & Day 1 Tweet Stream From #OOW12

Published on October 1, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Enjoy the Day 0 and Day 1 Tweet stream.

The Storify Tweet Stream

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Event Report: The Tweet Stream From #DF12

Published on September 23, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Enjoy the tweet stream from #DF12. It’s all in here.

The Storify Tweet Stream

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Event Report: Dreamforce X (#DF12) Emerges As The South By Southwest (#SXSW) For The Enterprise

Published on by R "Ray" Wang

Dreamforce Represents The Mecca For The “Art Of The Possible” In The Enterprise

Whether Salesforce.com’s flagship conference at Moscone Center was the most attended conference (~48,000) or the most registered for event (~90,000), matters not. When examined in context of the magnitude of what was accomplished, the impact of this 10th annual event transcends attendance numbers. Business folks and the converted IT brethren converged on the week of September 18th, 2012, to see what the future could be inside the enterprise. They left with inspiration and the gospel of what was possible, as told by those before them. The event represented the intersection of where aspiration meets innovation for the enterprise.

Key takeaways from interviews with over 100 attendees reflect the following trends:

Attendee sentiment signals the return of the front office. Prior to the coining of the CRM term, front office was the term which defined marketing, service, eCommerce, and sales force automation. The move back to integrated customer experiences reflects a renewed interest in all the front office touch points and all the support in the back office required to support the customer experience. Attendees walked in with questions about how to integrate their legacy ERP and expose their transactional systems into the front office.
Customers seek knowledge and case studies on business transformation. Delegations arrived to see how they could change their business. Most came with both business and IT to learn from the best practices of others. Almost every customer case study session was packed and common questions revolved around, “How did you do that?”
Product announcements and pre-announcements bring the enterprise closer to the consumer experience. Pre-announcement of Salesforce Identity for Winter 2013 will provide users with Facebook-like single sign on and identity management services. The availability of the Touch Platform services will provide a write once, deploy anywhere touch based mobile UI Experience. The pre-announcement of the Force.com Canvas provides a UI layer to run any other application within the Salesforce.com environment. The App Exchange Checkout delivers out of the box billing for developers and improves the users app store experience. Geolocation capabilities in the pilot of database.com in the Winter 2013 release will improve mobile experiences. Chatter communities pilot in Fall of 2012 and pre-announcement addresses the issue of multiple group management.
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Market Maker 1:1: #HRTechConf Preview w/ Bill Kutik

Published on August 7, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

15 Years of HR Technology At The Industry’s Premier Event

The fifteenth annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition returns to McCormick Place in Chicago October 8th to 10th, 2012. HR Tech is the industry’s longest running event looking at technologies that influence the Future of Work.

The Inside View With Bill Kutik – Future of Work Pioneer And Co-Chairman of HR Tech

Since 1990, Bill Kutik has been a Technology Columnist for Human Resource Executive® (and for HREOnline™ since 2006,), also serving as co-chairman of the magazine’s famous annual conference, HR Technology® Conference & Exhibition, since it began in 1998. In 2008, he started The Bill Kutik Radio Show®, a bi-weekly online talk show with industry leaders.

HR World named him one of “The Top 25 HR Influencers of 2007.” More recently, he was named a “Top 25 HR Digital Influencer 2009″ and a “Top 100 Influencer.”

For 20 years, he was consulting editor for Esther Dyson’s leading computer industry newsletter, Release 1.0. Previously he was the founding editor of the monthly magazine, Computers in HR Management; managing editor of Ziff-Davis’ Computer Industry Daily; and a reporter for The New York Times and The New York Daily News. He has also published articles in Newsweek, Washington Post, Institutional Investor, New York Magazine, Business Month, IHRIM Journal, Cruising World and Backpacker (where he was the founding editor).

We sat down with industry pioneer Bill Kutik for a preview of this year’s event:

1. Where do you see the new trends in HR tech going? What’s changed since last year? (Have we moved beyond Cloud, is everything social?)

Bill Kutik (BK): This year marks an inflection point in HR technology – perhaps in all of IT – the end of one era and the beginning of another, a generational shift in computing.

It happens every 10 – 15 years and remarkably HR has often been at the leading edge of change, either because corporations thought it didn’t matter if IT experiments failed there or because it’s the only department that touches every employee in the company.

Remember, PeopleSoft released the first packaged client/server application (for HR but the first for any function) in 1989, which started the death of the mainframe. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s claims aside, HR has been using hosted applications (perhaps not anyone’s version of true SaaS) for recruiting since 1998 and major web-based applications since 2000.

Now the combination of SaaS (Cloud Computing) plus Social in the Enterprise – companies using private collaborative software to get real work done – are marking a new era in computing.

These will be among the major topics this year at the HR Technology® Conference in Chicago, October 8-10.

2. Why the continued interest and investment by organizations in HR and related technologies?

BK: The main reason is the 50-year-long lie in large type in corporate annual reports is finally seen as true: “People are our most important asset.” People costs, even in manufacturing firms with huge capital investments, are more than 50 percent of the annual run-rate. Obviously closer to 90 percent in knowledge-based firms like consulting, law, accounting and software.

To succeed in 2012, organizations must have an effective people strategy aligned with their goals. They must identify the best players, assign them to the right work and keep them engaged. Technology doesn’t create this strategy – executives do – but they can’t properly execute their strategy without the right technology to enable it.

HR technology isn’t for HR anymore. The latest applications reaching mass adoption – such as the Talent Management suite – are now used almost exclusively by line managers and employees after HR has purchased the software and configured it properly.

3. Are 2012 HR technology budgets increasing compared to prior years?

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News Analysis: Informatica Launches MDM 9.5

Published on May 15, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

New Product Addresses The Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data World

The convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data (analytics), and video/unified comms changes the playing field from transactional applications to engagement applications. The result – a sea change of new data types from structured and unstructured sources. With greater volumes of data, demand for information shifts from real time to right time inside and outside the enterprise. Context by process, by roles, by location, and by any other segmentation requires a robust MDM solution to improve the return on #bigdata. Unfortunately, many master data management solutions have not been designed to handle this new world of business led requirements.

Enter Informatica’s MDM 9.5 product launched May 15th, 2012 at Informatica World (#IW2012). Some key features in 9.5 highlight the move to social, mobile, cloud, and industries:

Versioning – effective dates deliver timelines. The new product delivers effective dating to define and manage past, current, and future versions of a record. Delivered at the base object level, relationships are automatically version-enabled.

Point of View (POV): Future analysis of social and mobile data will require the ability to segment and correlate by time. The solution can model hierarchies and entities by past, present and future. More importantly, versioning provides rich compliance information that will serve as a backbone for information governance of a wide variety of data types and sources..

Social MDM – Facebook apps connect to customer profiles. The new Facebook and MDM connectivity provides a social graph of the customer and friends of the customer. Users gain bi-directional connectivity.

Point of View (POV): Connection to Facebook not only brings rich profile information, but also delivers key multichannel connections. This linkage exposes and identifies common interests and relationships which build richer customer profiles. Customers should work hard to drive data out of Facebook and not into Facebook, reducing the trading of privacy for convenience.

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Event Report: Questions Every #SAPPHIRENOW Attendee Should Be Asking SAP

Published on May 12, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

SAP’s In The Midst Of Massive Transformation

Just four years ago, nervous attendees dealt with a tumultuous global market entering financial crisis. SAP’s management team decided to raise maintenance fees to shore up its margins amidst a drought of innovation. Customers revolted en masse. Policies changed due to user group and global influencer pressure. Less than 18 months later, a defiant CEO resigned and a new management team resolved to improve relationships with key customers and address the lack of product innovation.

Fast forward to 2012, SAP’s acquired its way into innovation with BI/analytics (Business Objects), mobile (Sybase), cloud and HR (SuccessFactors), and a tiny bit of Social (SuccessFactors Cube Tree) (See Figure 1.). SAP HANA serves as the foundation for the future product line. SAP’s experimenting with consumer apps such as Recalls+. Innovation in R&D shifts from the star building fortresses of Walldorf to agile tech hubs in TelAviv, Palo Alto, Vancouver, Bangalore, and Shanghai. From the outside view, SAP’s placed long term bets in innovation on its road to 1B users. The growth in market cap from €30.9B in 2008 to €57.8B (as of 5/11/2012) reflects this perception by the financial community. Has SAP succeeded where other software vendors have failed during massive periods of transition?

Figure 1. SAP Covers Three Out Of Five Innovation Pillars In The Consumerization of IT

Customers Have Reason To Remain Cautious Of SAP’s Ability To Execute

From a customers point of view, the verdict remains mixed. Loyal customers have seen a series of failures from SAP over the past decade as it attempts to make the shift and claim innovation. Most industry observers would agree that SAP’s made significant investments in innovation. However, the results of organic innovation have mostly failed from products to services. A review of the past decade shows four proof points:

Delays in the next, next, next, no make that the next version of R/3. For those waiting for the latest version of ERP, the core product will probably show up late to mid decade. Maintenance plans call for end of support in 2020 which means SAP plans a product between now and 2018 at the latest. Customers seeking deeper industry functionality now turn to system integrators who build the user exits and customizations required to continue business. Meanwhile, the market for third party SAP products has never been stronger. A string of SaaS vendors have emerged to address the “edge applications” in incentive comp, talent management, pricing, travel and expense, collaboration, and marketing automation that SAP previously ignored. Some of these “edge vendors” such as Salesforce.com have emerged as billion dollar companies creating new markets. Yet, after several product chiefs and a decade of trying, SAP applications still lack common data models (e.g. there are at least 8 in use), common interfaces, and common process models. The much hailed enhancement packages delivering “timeless” software require slightly less work than previous upgrades but still require a lot of planning, testing, time, and money.
Clearly a confusing cloudy cloud strategy awaiting partly sunny skies. Business by design still has not achieved the tens of thousands of customers by 2010 when it was announced. At best, SAP has a bit over 1000 live customers. Customers who use the ByD product have mostly expressed positive comments and have seen the benefits of the OnDemand based approach. The distribution of the product to the masses and incentivization of sales execution remains challenging to a country club, shake-hands, relationship sales culture. Meanwhile, a series of well designed, and compelling products from the SAP OnDemand for Large Enterprise initiatives remain under marketed, and in some cases late to market. Timing could not have been worse as the SuccessFactors acquisition has clouded the cloud strategy. Customers seek cost effective, heterogeneous, integration options from their on-premises core to the cloud options. SAP still has to deliver on an integration framework customers find cost effective and can trust.
Never so easy, NetWeaver remains hard to use, rigid at best. Various attempts at an SAP middleware have finally made headway. The solutions now include an ABAP version and a Java version. Previous versions remained hard to use, complicated to maintain, and confusing for the developer ecosystem and the system integrators. Recent UI improvements help IT leaders convince business customers that they can ease back into SAP. Everything does look better in an iPad, including SAP. Sybase’s mobile platform replaces a failed and feeble attempt at NetWeaver mobile. Many customers begrudgingly use NetWeaver and something else. That something else – well, it’s typically 1/2 or 1/4 the cost.
Great new maintenance offerings, low user acceptance due to sales not service offering. SAP’s made considerable effort to improve its maintenance offerings with new programs and offers to lower the cost of ownership. Each offer considers the lifecycle of ownership and shows great care and craft in creation. While most customers show initial interest, the sales process attempts to tie maintenance offers into new professional service revenue instead of reducing the overall spend with SAP. Because customers mostly see ERP now as a legacy infrastructure, CIO’s intend to drive cost out not invest more in. Hence, many customers consider a move to third party maintenance options and SAP optimization solutions.