Why it makes sense to use a third party to keep the IT lights on

CIOs face multiple challenges in keeping operational systems running while also embarking on digital transformation initiatives, according to a report from Nucleus Research for Rimini Street, published last month.

Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research, said that while software providers may offer attractive incentives for customers to move from their legacy systems to new cloud applications, “those moves require both financial and resource investment, and potential risk and disruption”.

Nucleus found that many customers are looking at other options, including moving to a more business-driven roadmap that reduces their dependence on their existing software provider to support older products.

“With a major implementation, by the time a corporate is ready to deploy the product, it is already out of support,” said Charles Oldroyd, a Cognos expert who works for third-party support firm Origina.

“IBM and Microsoft will take products out of support to push companies to upgrade,” he added. “A simple Cognos BI implementation could take nine to 12 months and it is nearer two years before it is fully deployed. This is the gap between major product releases.”

As such, businesses often find they are running older versions of the product – and then the countdown clock starts ticking to the time when the product’s official support ends, said Oldroyd.

In his experience, the challenge for many organisations is that their IT infrastructure is built to support the previous version of the product, so it has not been tested on the newest product release. 

For the CIO and IT department, said Oldroyd, “by the time a product is about to be updated, the version deployed is a pretty stable platform”.

Speaking as a Cognos trainer, Oldroyd said: “Between version 10 of Cognos Analytics to version 11, Cognos changed its user interface completely, so users needed retraining.”

Change can be a good thing, he said, but added: “The rate of change in corporates is very slow. Software takes longer to implement and change is incredibly expensive and painful. The workforce is generally more willing to expect inefficiencies, than change – and making a change is no small thing. So companies are quite prepared to hold on to legacy software.”

In many cases, businesses do not see a direct benefit from upgrading, compared with if they continued to run their existing setup, said Oldroyd.

Nucleus’ research found that customers moving from licence maintenance provided by their enterprise software provider to third-party support are typically able to at least halve their annual support spend.

When it assessed Rimini customers, Nucleus found they were able to save a further 10-15% of IT staff time, on average, associated with eliminating the time needed to review and assess the impact of supplier-driven patches and updates and accelerate the time to resolve issues.

As well as the cost benefits of moving to third-party support, Nucleus found that organisations were also able to take back control of their IT strategy and decide how quickly they wanted to follow their enterprise software provider’s roadmap.

“Companies wanted to gain control of their application lifecycle and cloud migration plans without being constrained by vendor-defined timelines,” Wetterman wrote in the report. “They wanted to reduce both the risk of disruption to the business and the risk that they would move to a new solution that was unproven or not the best fit for their business. Overall, they wanted to ‘future-proof’ their application strategy and define a roadmap for continuous change that was predicated on business needs, not the (sometimes unpredictable) path of dominant vendors.”