19 Nov Environmental services company slashes $750k a year in software support costs
With budgets tightening for many CIOs, continuing to spend large amounts of money on software support and maintenance is not something to be taken lightly. The Australian CIO of environmental services company Veolia, Brett Stapleton, says he was reluctant to sink “millions” into an SAP upgrade and ongoing support for the platform.
Veolia is a global company that handles waste collection and disposal, waste water and drinking water treatment, and energy supply and management services. In Australia, waste management accounts for 80 per cent of revenue, and more than 800 SAP users that rely on the company’s software for this part of the business.
Stapleton said there is not only pressure globally to cut costs in the organization, but also to find money for innovation and investment in more mission-critical IT for the business.
That’s why he turned to support provider Rimini Street, which helped him save about $750,000 a year in software support and maintenance costs. This included cost savings in the different vendor partners that Veolia had put in place for payroll upgrades, which occurred twice a year in Australia and New Zealand.
“Reinvesting in continued maintenance in an SAP platform to keep the lights on in the business is not really a good use of money,” he said today at the Gartner Symposium on the Gold Coast.
“Spending lots of money, taking an SAP platform that looks like this today, making it look newer tomorrow, as an enabler for additional functionality is not really where our organisation wants to spend money.”
He added that the company was still emotionally recovering from a highly troublesome SAP implementation, so there was no appetite for another SAP upgrade in order to receive continued support.