Oracle Application customers are widely dissatisfied with the quality and cost of Oracle’s maintenance and support programs, but many nevertheless plan to give the vendor an increasing share of their IT budgets over the next three years.
The study, Go-Forward Strategies for Oracle Application Customers, shows that 35% are dissatisfied with the quality of Oracle support and 7% are very dissatisfied, as shown in Figure 1. The respondents include users of its E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards, Siebel, and Hyperion applications.
Dissatisfaction with the cost of that support is even more widespread. The study finds 59% are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the cost of Oracle’s support for its business applications.
Despite the dissatisfaction, only 25% of the Oracle customers expect the vendor, with its growing portfolio of applications, middleware, and systems, will have a smaller share of their IT budgets over the next three years. Another 37% indicate such factors as organic growth, purchase of additional Oracle applications, and standardization on Oracle technology will result in Oracle having an even larger share of their IT budgets. The remaining respondents judged Oracle’s share of their IT spending would be about the same in three years.
Other key findings of the study:
- Dissatisfaction levels vary by Oracle product: overall dissatisfaction is greatest among PeopleSoft customers, while a surprisingly large percentage of E-Business Suite customers are unhappy with the cost of support.
- Third-party maintenance options have not yet gained substantial mindshare, with the majority of Oracle application customers not considering or having already decided against third-party maintenance.
- Oracle’s next-generation applications, dubbed Fusion Applications, are not on the radar for most customers, with only 10% planning to migrate to Fusion. There is substantial difference in migration plans, depending on the Oracle product currently installed.
- Only 25% of Oracle application customers are currently users of Sun hardware, but among these customers, expectations for increasing support costs are high. Very few Oracle application customers have plans for Oracle’s new Exadata storage systems.
- In terms of internal support, the staffing ratios for E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft are lowest—that is, these systems require the greatest number of internal support staff to keep them running. JD Edwards is highest and requires the fewest.
The full study assesses customer satisfaction with Oracle support, plans for migration to Fusion applications, use of Sun hardware, consideration of third-party maintenance services, and forecasts for Oracle’s share of IT budgets. It presents survey results for E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards, and Hyperion applications.
In addition, it provides application support staffing ratios for each application, which can be used for benchmarking and planning purposes. It concludes with recommendations for how customers should move forward with Oracle applications. This special report includes extensive open-ended comments from the survey respondents, providing insights and color into their thinking, with over 70 specific comments quoted from the 109 Oracle customers that took part in this in-depth survey.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Go-Forward Strategies for Oracle Application Customers. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).