If you asked Kevin Smith three years ago what it’s like to have your outsourcer acquired by another company, he might have said, “No problem.” Today, however, he’s got a different tale to tell. That’s because Smith, information systems director at Spyder Active Sports Inc. in Boulder, Colo., has had the experience not once, but twice. And while the first transition couldn’t have gone more smoothly, the second ended in disarray.
It all started six years ago, when the outerwear designer and manufacturer outsourced its J.D. Edwards ERP system to application service provider (ASP) Prentice Technologies Inc. Three years later, when Prentice was bought by Fortrust Solutions, a data center management firm that wanted to move into the ASP arena, the handoff went fine. “It was all well managed,” Smith says.
Then, in mid-2004, Fortrust sold its ASP business to a software-as-a-service provider in California. The transition itself went smoothly enough, but over the next year and a half, service levels dropped off, and gradually, nearly all the original Fortrust staffers left the firm, Smith says. “Several times, I asked their management, ‘Are you guys serious about this line of business? Because it doesn’t appear that way to me,’” he says. “On several occasions, I even offered to pay more for better service, but they never took me up on it.”
Read more at: Computerworld