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Matt Stava, Shawn du Plessis, Spinnaker Support

Spinnaker Support – Exceptional Third-Party Support and Managed Services for SAP Customers Spinnaker Support

Today’s business leaders must stay on top of new, emerging, and future technologies or risk falling behind the competition. But where to start? You are undoubtedly exploring the latest trends to identify the best options for your organization. But how will you ever implement these options with so much of your IT budget earmarked for maintenance of existing on-premise software applications?
As a leading third-party provider of SAP software support services, Spinnaker Support can address that issue. Spinnaker Support’s SAP services are a solution to a continuously pressing business problem: how to get real value out of annual software support while taking control of your technology roadmap.
Spinnaker Support’s service delivers the same set of software break/fix, tax and regulatory, general use, and vulnerability management support as SAP’s self-service model. Still, it improves upon it through a full-service, personalized delivery model at a fraction of the price. Customers rated Spinnaker Support’s third-party SAP support at over 97% in the latest customer satisfaction survey.
In addition to third-party support, they offer Basis, Business Intelligence, and Sybase/ASE managed services so that customers can conveniently bundle additional services under a single vendor.
Matt Stava, CEO
Matt Stava founded Spinnaker Support in 2008 and has served as the Chief Executive Officer since inception. Initially an executive for internationally recognized supply chain consultancies, Stava realized that users sought higher quality support for an affordable price. Under his leadership, Spinnaker Support has consistently achieved rapid growth by proving SAP users can receive high-quality software support services for less than half the cost of SAP’s fees, and then invest those savings to drive their technology vision.
Spinnaker Support launched the SAP Support Division in May 2012. Stava’s vision and strategy for Spinnaker Support includes hiring the most experienced and proven software engineers, with substantial application and surrounding technology stack expertise. The global team is led by SAP and third-party support veteran, Shawn du Plessis. He ensures the global team consistently follows ISO 9001:2015 standards and avoids shortcuts that infringe on others’ intellectual property rights.
Abundant benefits for the clients
Spinnaker Support customers gain expert, personalized, and proactive annual software support, significant annual savings, and the freedom to choose their path of technology innovation – whether that means staying with SAP or not. Spinnaker Support provides a range of 24/7 global services covering more than 120 SAP products, including R/3, ECC6, BusinessObjects, Sybase, and HANA database. Additionally, Spinnaker Support maintains Oracle’s Runtime Database for many of its SAP clients.
The majority of their SAP customers contract for the third-party support offering, which includes software break fixes, tax and regulatory updates, general inquiry support, and a range of technology advisory services designed to ensure interoperability in dynamic environments, application security, and virtualization. Customers welcome their support engineers as a part of their own internal IT team and trust their independent guidance regarding go-forward initiatives for cloud migration, transformation, and digitalization.
SAP will construct hurdles to departure
SAP has had its stumbles in 2020 related to the global economic disruption. But that does not mean that it will not fight fiercely for its support business. In 2020, it increasingly used audits and indirect access as tactics to retain support customers and optimize revenue by requiring them to purchase additional products to mitigate exposures.
SAP may offer customers discounts or cloud credits or may threaten reinstatement fees to keep its support business. It also modified its standard licensing agreements, which can complicate the cancellation process. To help SAP customers navigate these barriers, Spinnaker Support engages independent partners with expertise in licensing and SAP negotiation.
Consolidating services before moving to the cloud
Industry analysts agree that cloud-first thinking will continue to dominate IT executive’s strategies, but most SAP users are waiting for SAP cloud offerings to materialize. This could take years, and SAP has acknowledged this by extending their support deadlines for their ERP and other products. The same industry analysts project that the third-party support market will remain a strong support alternative to enable the long-term vision at least through 2030.
More and more organizations that run SAP seek that single vendor to provide more services, reduce overall costs, and offer flexible commercial contracts that can shrink or grow with need and economic conditions. Spinnaker Support also offers a smart range of managed services and project-based consulting.
To supplement their SAP capabilities, Spinnaker Support is signing new global alliances in emerging areas like application security, performance monitoring and tuning, and cloud/SaaS support. This includes a continued investment in critical areas such as database optimization. While their service mix continues to evolve, their commitment to delivering expert service is ingrained in the business model. This approach to steady, strategic growth in service capabilities brings further benefits to customers over what is typically a long-term partnership.
Experts on the cutting edge of SAP
Spinnaker Support hires experts familiar with the latest in SAP and surrounding stack technology. Because the vast majority of SAP shops may not be ready for – or fully comfortable with – the ERP cloud, they are looking to vendors like Spinnaker Support to deliver cost savings that can help fund eventually fund the migration and advice on how to best get there.
Bringing it all together for exceptional service
Since its inception, Spinnaker Support has focused on providing comprehensive, convenient, and high-value services to SAP customers, a majority of which stay for years and actively act as references. Spinnaker Support delivers support services with integrity, avoiding the violation of the intellectual property rights of others.
They continue to innovate and expand their services to meet the needs of the market. For example, Stava and his team regularly engage with prospects, industry influencers from analyst firms like Gartner, and the IT journalist community to understand and adjust their services to meet changing customer needs.