Business Objects users angry over online support shift by SAP

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July 16, 2008 (IDG News Service) Some customers of Business Objects SA, the business intelligence vendor that was acquired by SAP AG earlier this year, are steaming mad because they aren't able to access SAP's online support site.

SAP, which bought Business Objects in January for nearly $7 billion, switched the BI vendor's online product support processes to its own system on July 7. But SAP acknowledged this week that some problems have occurred. The company said that it is working as quickly as possible to resolve the issues and that phone support is available for all Business Objects customers in the meantime.

But SAP can't fix the problems fast enough for John Sanzone, a BI and data warehousing specialist at a large U.S.-based IT services provider that he asked not be identified. Sanzone said he has been trying without success to get a usable log-in for the online support site since the July 7 changeover. "This is not the service I was expecting," he said.

A database administrator, who works at a hospital in the U.S. and asked to be identified only as Wayne H., said that SAP apparently sent a letter with the required new passwords and log-in information for the support to a woman on the business side of his organization. But she no longer works there, he said, adding, "This is just a mess."

But the support hang-up isn't causing any serious problems for the DBA at this point. "For the time being," he said, "I'm able to support our company's needs."

Many other Business Objects users also are reporting problems accessing the SAP support site. For example, a discussion thread about the support snafu on an independent bulletin board for Business Objects users was stretching across 10 pages as of 7 p.m. EDT on Wednesday.

Frank Scavo, president of IT market research firm Computer Economics Inc., said in a post on his Enterprise System Spectator blog last Friday that SAP — which also plans to convert all of its users to its highest-priced support offering by next January — may have made a serious miscalculation on the Business Objects support changeover.

"It sounds like a deadline-date-driven migration for which SAP was not prepared," Scavo wrote. "If SAP is going to make major strategic acquisitions in the future, it is going to have to learn how to make them painless for customers."

An SAP official said that the software vendor thought it had covered all the required bases before making the switch and that it is doing everything it can to correct the situation. "We didn't go into it knowing we were going to cause pain, but having made the decision to go forward, going back is not an option," said Andy Cobbold, group vice president of global customer assurance at SAP.

Reprinted with permission from

IDG.net
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