Marines replace SAP software
The Marine Corps and the Agriculture Department, citing cost, incompatibility and other issues, are replacing their SAP software with another vendor’s.
In yet another government turnabout, the Marine Corps and the Agriculture Department are replacing their SAP software with another vendor’s. Both are replacing their current business intelligence software with Jaspersoft.
The news follow reports that California’s Marin County is not only replacing its SAP enterprise resource planning software but suing the integrator, Deloitte Consulting, for fraud over the excessive costs of the failed installation.
Related coverage:
California county dumps SAP, sues Deloitte
According to Sam Friedman, business intelligence practice manager for Column Technologies and IT solution architect for Marine Corps, the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune replaced SAP Crystal Reports with Jaspersoft because using Crystal Reports software over the Web was costly. It had become costly and technically complex to scale the software to the level needed, and it was incompatible with the Corps’ pre-built Web connector, he said. SAP’s Web connector also only worked on Microsoft Windows, not Linux or Unix.
"Jaspersoft's Business Intelligence Suite cut out a significant bottleneck in IT," Friedman said. USMC employees can access real-time information and non-technical users can create reports via a Web portal using Jaspersoft, which the agency was unable to do previously.
USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture is replacing business intelligence software from both Oracle and SAP. The new technology is a commercial open-source stack solution including Linux, Infobright, Talend and Jaspersoft.
NIFA moved away from Oracle and SAP because the costs associated with the software platforms exceeded the agency’s budget, performance issues with SAP and lengthy development cycles with Oracle, which delayed funding for the technology.
According to Joe Barbano, a project manager for NIFA, moving to open-source software “was really an easy sell. We were able to be up and running very quickly and respond much more efficiently to congressional inquiries – all at a fraction of the cost that proprietary software would have cost us."