IT Manglement

Farewell, TomorrowNow

We're in the midst of determining what to do now that our third-party support vendor for PeopleSoft (TomorrowNow) will be departing the scene. We were notified about a month ago that SAP was pulling the plug on TN. While SAP was not explicit about the cause, it is almost certainly due to the significant legal cloud hanging over TN's head. It has been public knowledge for some time that SAP was shopping for a buyer for TN, but apparently no one wanted the liability given the assets.

This is a major disappointment. We were quite satisfied (well, most of us were) with the service and support from TN. From IT's perspective, TN helped us solve issues that neither PeopleSoft (in its original corporate form) nor Oracle (after it acquired PeopleSoft) were able to address. I think that is significant, and I believe it is entirely due to the business model TN followed. Software vendors have little incentive to fix certain classes of problems in a given release; rather, they wrap the problems up in a subsequent release. That works well as long as you stay current. However, staying current with PeopleSoft was very expensive for us, particularly given that we do not use much of the base functionality of the application. Freezing at our current release level and going with third-party support made much more sense - or, at least, that's what I believe. For the record, I was not with this organization when they made the commitment to PeopleSoft, so I can't comment as to the appropriateness of the original decision-making process.

TN's departure from the scene is also causing a mini-crisis. We have to get a new support vendor by the end of October. We have been on multiple conference calls, and are continuing to check references. It comes down to one of two choices; go back to Oracle for support, or find a new third party-vendor.

Oracle
This is the safe choice, but it will be a budget-buster. This is due not only to the raw support cost (roughly double what we were paying TN), but also because Oracle's first question is ALWAYS "Have you installed the latest bundles?" That means we will have to upgrade our current installation of PeopleSoft, and keep installing bundles as they are released. And, by the way, the bundles rarely, if ever, solve the problem we are experiencing. It is just another hoop you have to jump through to get to the support you really need. Another hidden cost is that it appears Oracle is investing little in PeopleSoft upgrades; rather, we will be paying for Fusion development. Whether we would ever migrate to Fusion is unclear. According to Gartner, it is likely that a migration to Fusion for us would be more like an implementation of a new application, with all the significant costs that entails. And we want to pay for that with high support fees?

However, there are some of our users that insist this is the best option. PeopleSoft is, after all, the users' application, not IT's. If that is what they want and they will fund it, that's where we will go.

Third Party
TN has offered us a list of third party support vendors, and we are now performing reference checks and other due diligence. Because of some non-disclosure agreements I can't get much more specific. However, it is good to know there are other third party vendors out there delivering much the same product as TN. They all appear to have learned from TN's mistakes. That issue is a significant portion of our due diligence, as we don't need another surprise like this one anytime soon. I personally like the third-party approach, and think it will fit us well until it comes time for us to replace PeopleSoft, sometime in the middle of the next decade. Oracle support for the current PeopleSoft version ends in 2014; that is a little soon for our comfort level. Third party support can keep the application alive for some time past that, although I am concerned that the technology platform and / or stack may become obsolete and cause other support issues.

I'm sure it will be interesting reaching a conclusion, although as I keep stating it is not an IT decision. We have an opinion, but in this situation we will go whichever way the user groups feel is best.

posted by Craig @ 12:43 PM