Spinnaker Support: Third-Party Maintenance and Support for SAP Implementations

In countries like Korea and Japan, organizations that run SAP are searching for an alternative application support model that enhances service quality and reduces maintenance fees. They seek a model that doesn’t force unwanted application version upgrades and one that won’t pushapath of SAP-only cloud offerings. SAP customers deserve the freedom to choose their own IT roadmaps, on their own timeframes, and they welcome cost cutting initiatives that help fund digital transformation and cloud migration.

Spinnaker Support is now successfully delivering such a model across the Asia Pacific region. The company’s third-party support offering is bringing comprehensive and highly responsive service at a dramatic cost reduction – where 93 customers across APAC countries are now averaging over 60 percent savings compared to the cost of SAP maintenance fees. From Spinnaker Support, organizations get premier support for 130 SAP products for as long as desired; no forced upgrades and without further push to SAP’s “online” self-support model.

Spinnaker Support’s offering includes support for break fixes, tax and regulatory updates, full technology stack security, and proactive general inquiries. Support includes 7x24x365 support at an average response time of 8 minutes for standard code, customized code, and interfaces. Also included as standard is a range of smart technology advisory services designed to keep SAP applications running at peak performance while remaining interoperable and secure through technology stack modernizations. While increasingly more SAP customers are concerned with the software vendor’s increased tempo of license audits and indirect access threats, Spinnaker Support provides resources to help right size license counts and to prepare for license audits.

Each Spinnaker Support customer is assigned anamed team of SAP application engineers, hand-picked for their unique SAP environment and global footprint. Customers have direct access to the team, an unlikely scenario while consulting with SAP. Well versed on older, newer, and even emerging SAP software solutions, Spinnaker Support engineers often help customers to more proficiently navigate from on-premise to hybrid to cloud.

One Spinnaker Support Asia Pacific customer is a global leader in test and measurement, providing solutions to customers in a wide range of fields, from semiconductor manufacturing and R&D to electronics, medical devices and pharmaceuticals. This customer will reduce maintenance fees by more than $4.4 million across the term of the support agreement, savings now being redirected to boost research and development spend and to generate more stable profits. “Not only do our customers save money, but they are highly satisfied with our service level,” says Lee Mashburn, Vice President, Spinnaker Support. He further adds, “Customer satisfaction scores have approached 99 percent for each of the last several years.”





With great capabilities to support SAP users, the company is consistently growing at a rate of 40 percent every year and to develop further, it continues to bring in employees with advanced expertise. Spinnaker Support also has plans to expand within Asia Pacific region in the next few years. The company is also planning to strengthen its expertise in managed services to assist businesses with their technical and application management requirements as a large segment of SAP users move to the advanced versions of the application HANA and S4 HANA. “As our customers are migrating from on-premise to cloud, our service offering is also migrating from on-premise support to managed services in the cloud,” concludes Nigel Pullan, Vice President of the company’s APAC and EMEA operations.