I am being faced with the stark reality of having to drop ADS completely. I LOVE Advantage. I have been using since early (Pre SQL) days.
I definitely appreciate all that you guys do at this level. However, I lost a sale yesterday because the potential customer felt that SAP didn't really care about this product. They felt it was something SAP got stuck with as part of an acquisition and it seems the ADS team over there isn't getting any support. The exact phrase the CIO told us was 'It seems as those ADS is their adopted step-child that they have to tolerate because they have to in order to keep the wife happy.'
The sale yesterday I lost would have been for three 250 user licenses, one 500 user license, a bunch of 10 users and replication throughout.
But their IT executives were smart enough to pay close attention to the timelines they find on here. They see that the legacy ADS product isn't being given any form of priority. They know how long it took to get version 12 out. They know most (or possibly all?) of us old partners can't directly download the tools we need. The version 12 service pack is out and yet I (and i'm assuming others) can't even download the initial release directly. We've had to fudge it by downloading the demo.
I am hoping that this makes it up to the higher ups in the company. Advantage is a solid product. Why is there clearly such difficulty in bringing in the old ADS community into the fold? The ADS Team always is replying quickly on the forums here, but its taking a long time to get updates out, we can't seem to get the resources WE need to support existing customers and now I am out a very lucrative sale. I have no doubt that others in that industry that have been talking to will hear about the reasons they chose to not move forward with ADS as our backend and that will cost me more sales this year.
I put a request in to purchase a 10 user license on Dec 17th and I STILL haven't gotten a reply. Now even this SMALL client is hesitant to move forward.
Please tell us there is some plan in place?!?! Are there not enough ADS customers/Partners existing anymore to even have ADS be a truly respectable blip on the grander SAP roadmap? If need be, call me at 800-880-9492 if they don't want to reply publicly!?
Thanks,
Chris