Choosing third party support

One of our sister sites, Search400.com ran a story about a company that is dropping vendor support of its JDE World applications. The firm is choosing a third party provider for support services. I’d like to hear your comments about this. What are the advantages and drawbacks of choosing a third party support provider? If a company isn’t going to upgrade, is there still a sense of comfort in keeping vendor support and maintenance?

Oracle Corp. has a mantra about the associated risks of choosing a third party support provider. Information Week ran a story on third party application support providers. The story focuses on TomorrowNow, the PeopleSoft support provider that was later acquired by SAP.

-Rob Westervelt, News Editor