As a third party we have earned the business of many happy customers. We have also noticed tremendous inconsistency in how members within the ecosystem including SAP itself evaluates third party solution providers. These reasons include personal biased from bad previous experiences, false or incorrect expectations, and of course legitimate corporate policies.
The top 5 reasons customers tell us that they can’t work with Centigon Solutions as a provider for add-ons for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards:
1. “I only want to use what comes out of the box”
OUR REPLY: This is the most common reason for not using add-ons. At the end of the day when purchasing software, specifically add-on solutions, you have to make a case for a return on investment. When it comes to development tools like Essentials Bundle, we believe that unless your time is worth less than $20/hr, Essentials Bundle pays for itself in the first dashboard project, even with the minor technology learning curve. There are more extreme time savings with products like Antivia XWIS which can cut down integration and connectivity 10-20x what a developer would spend messing with standard Xcelsisus development processes.
Now we ask you: “How much is your developer’s time worth and how much money are you wasting?”
2. “I want one point of support”
OUR REPLY: One point of support is important especially for large enterprises who don’t want to keep track of many different support ticket systems or vendor support service level agreements. It is safe to say SAP’s support and documentation is far from top notch. For Centigon Solutions products, 1.6% of our customer base logs a support case each week. Why? Our support center is the most frequently used portion of our website full of tutorials and templates. While third party support does typically lack the support staffing of a large enterprise, the actual time to resolution is typically a fraction of what you get from a large organization like SAP.
Now we ask you: “When a dashboard component or connection is not behaving as you expect or if you find a legitimate bug, where do you go and how long do you wait to get your issue resolved by SAP?”
3. “SAP will eventually give us the same functionality”
OUR REPLY: Taking a trip down memory lane we know this is flat out not true. Frankly we are surprised that the fantastic ideas to come from third parties have not been “borrowed” by SAP. Needless to say, at Centigon Solutions we not only fill gaps in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards. We also anticipate how you will use the software and what additional features you will need to make development simple.
Now we ask you: “When was the last new component added to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards that was not related to SAP BusinessObjects Platform integration?”
4. “We can’t use third party technology”
OUR REPLY: If you can’t use third-party technology because of a policy, your IT organization is doing a great disservice to end users (business consumers).
If you won’t use third party technology based on a bad previous experience, we can only offer the idea that you should do your due diligence when investigating a third party vendor. Credibility is everything in the marketplace so customers, leadership, and technology should all be carefully evaluated before making a judgment based on prior experiences.
Now we ask you: “Is it a policy or bias within your organization that is restricting you from taking advantage of the thriving third party ecosystem for SAP BusinessObjects?”
5. “You company may not be around long enough to support the technology and that introduces risk”
OUR REPLY: Technology companies come and go as products become obsolete, businesses get acquired, and other events occur. While nothing is absolute in the fast moving IT industry, at Centigon Solutions we have been innovating technologies for SAP BusinessObjects since 2007 and have many customers who use our technologies every day. In short, we are going absolutely nowhere!
OUR FINAL QUESTION FOR YOU
Can you provide us with a legitimate reason why third parties are not useful for your organization?
At the end of the day we are happy to be a part of the SAP ecosystem with other great partners. Many of them are listed on our partners page. We would love to hear your honest feedback on this subject.]]>
