Business Objects, SAP Support – Lessons Learned

One week later, and it seems the support situation at Business Objects is settling, although customers remain miffed and a handful still do not have access to support. There are lessons for customers and vendors alike from this situation, and a question of how the BI vendor will make amends to those most adversely affected.

 

For most customers, the issue of not accessing support was one primarily of inconvenience and frustration. As of mid last week, according to Business Objects, about 20% of customers lacked the ability to logon to the site to open or track existing cases. However, for some, the disruption in support service meant a delay in production implementations.

 

In speaking to Scott Bajtos, Business Objects’ Executive Vice President and Chief Satisfaction Officer, he acknowledged the migration had not gone as smoothly as expected. While some of the migration challenges were clearly planning related, it seems that the crux of the problems were twofold. First, the security for SAP’s Service Marketplace system is separate from the SAP security systems, and Business Objects underestimated the number of logons that would not be synchronized between the two. Second, the support migration was just one of several migrations Business Objects did last week to leverage the SAP infrastructure.

 

Looking ahead Bajtos said the main reasons for moving ahead aggressively with the migration to SAP’s support platform is partially cost related, but is primarily because the Service Marketplace is “light years ahead of the support capabilities Business Objects had under their previous support system.” Service Marketplace offers:

 

• an integrated knowledge management system, so that when a support case is resolved, other technicians and customers can see the resolution.
• Moderated forums, which while BOB– the user-driven forum – is an invaluable resource for Business Objects customers, the vendor never officially supported or contributed to.
• A better ability to do remote diagnostics.

 

The vision all sounds great to me, but let’s look at some of the sore points raised in the blog comments last week:

 

• Rate Increase: Support will increase to 22% of net licensing fees. While many customers are already at this rate, some customers were on a 20% rate for standard support that did not provide 24 by 7 access. The new rate gives 24X7 access. Customers will be migrated to the new rate over a 4-year period. As well, I’d like to point out that based on research done for BIScorecard, a number of BI competitors charge maintenance based on list pricing and not discounted pricing and that 22% is at the low end of the maintenance rate.

 

• Historical Cases: Historical case information will be migrated over and should be completed within the next two weeks. Customers will be able to access three years of history.

 

• SLAs: Regarding service level agreements, I continue to advocate that all enterprise BI customers negotiate this as part of their purchase agreement. While one blog commenter wrote that Business Objects was not open to this in the past, I suspect this is more of a historical BI issue and lack of customer demand (or insistence!). SLAs are less important when BI is deployed departmentally. For enterprise software (including SAP ERP) and hardware, SLAs are fairly standard. So as part of your evaluation process (see recommended process here), involve the purchasing department early in the process. If you wait to the 11^th hour, you may not be in the best bargaining position.

  

As I stated last week, I’d like to see more customers evaluate support – the quality, the costs, the capabilities - as part of BI buying. Including service level agreements in the contract would seem a natural evolution. In the meantime, I’ll be curious how Business Objects makes amends to customers for this support misstep and if indeed they can execute on their vision in this area.

 

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

Comments

[Bobj Guy]

Over the last two years, Bajitos has managed to make marginal improvements in a support organization he broke. When Business Objects bought Crystal, Crystal had fabulous support. Bobj had some of the worst support in BI. Bajitos was responsible for that. Customer sat surveys from companies that had both products were embarrassing for Bobj. Crystal's Dave Galloway was put in charge of the combined organization, but constantly undermined by Sales. Over the first two years after the acquisition, headcount shifted to create a much higher case load to engineer ratio in the Crystal teams and somewhat lower ratio in the Bobj teams. It wasn't enough of an effort to increase "classic" bobj customer sat, but it did manage to alienate "classic" Crystal customers. If Dave Galloway had been free to run support at bobj the way he ran it at Crystal, bobj would have the best support not only in BI, but in enterprise software. When Dave Galloway left, Bajitos was given the now combined bobj support back. He ruined support. Dozens of the most senior, experienced support engineers left for other parts of the company and were replaced by subpar outsourced contract help in India. So, sure, over the last two years, Bajitos has managed to stop the bleeding and even put a little salve on the wound, but it's a self-inflicted wound. That guy shouldn't be running a 7-11.

[Mark]

SAP has ruined Crystal. So many bugs, so little time. Can't even get a service pack installed. It hangs too.

Everey release has gotten progressively worse, but they keep issuing releases because it means money to them, in spite of screwing the end users.