Spinnaker launches in South Africa, backed by Motsepe's ARC - Mathew Stava — Spinnaker Support CEO Mathew Stava

Spinnaker Support, a US-based provider of third-party support for enterprise software, has formally launched in South Africa in partnership with Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital (ARC), pitching local enterprises a cheaper alternative to the support contracts SAP and Oracle sell alongside their ERP systems.

ARC has taken a minority stake in Spinnaker South Africa. Teko Mojaki has been appointed MD, with Jon Gill, Spinnaker’s vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, overseeing the broader regional roll-out.

The operation includes a dedicated support centre in Johannesburg that, according to Spinnaker founder and global CEO Mathew Stava, already employs around 15 people, backed by the company’s other regional hubs, chiefly London because of the alignment in time zones.

Although it launched officially this week, Spinnaker has been operating quietly in South Africa for about two years, signing customers ahead of the formal launch. One of them is Telkom, whose chief digital officer, Sello Mmakau, told the Joburg launch event the operator had saved “close to R800-million over five years” by moving its Oracle support across – though he stressed that price was not the only deciding factor.

Spinnaker Support was founded in the US in 2008 to support customers running Oracle’s JD Edwards enterprise software. Stava expanded the business into Oracle and SAP support about four years later, later adding VMware to the company’s offering. The company now has more than 1 200 customers globally, with delivery hubs in Denver, London, Dubai, Brazil and Melbourne.

Pitch

Its core pitch is that organisations should have an alternative to costly OEM software support, and should not be forced into expensive system upgrades that, while carrying a hefty price tag, do nothing for revenue.

“Upgrading finance or manufacturing is not adding value to your business, right? It’s just operational. And if it works and it functions really, really well, why are you changing it based upon what a company is telling you out of Germany?” Stava asked, pointedly.

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Spinnaker estimates savings of 55-65% against vendor rates, but Gill said the bigger number lies in upgrades avoided. He cited an Australian bank that was spending nearly A$40-million/year just to keep its Oracle databases on a supported version before switching.

Spinnaker is betting on its local presence and rand-based pricing as differentiators against rivals such as Rimini Street. Although its go-to-market strategy is mostly direct, it has partnered with iqbusiness as channel partner, among others.

Underpinning the move is Stava’s view that the role of ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle will shrink over time as agentic AI improves. He said companies and their technical leads are aware of this and are looking to redirect spending away from ERP support and maintenance towards innovations likelier to deliver a return.

“What I’m starting to see is less of the SAPs, and more best-of-breed software being pulled in for certain pieces of the process. [In future] the data is going to sit in a data lake of some sort, and you can start to see agentic AI come in and start running some of these processes that ERP today has traditionally been running,” Stava said.

Not everyone shares that view. SAP and Oracle are embedding agentic AI into their core ERP suites – SAP through its Joule assistant and Oracle through a growing range of AI agents – in a bid to keep the ERP layer central rather than see it hollowed out by best-of-breed tools and data lakes.

Next on the road map is open source. Stava said Spinnaker will launch PostgreSQL support in the coming quarter, followed by MongoDB and MariaDB – driven, he said, by existing customers wanting help migrating off Oracle. Locally, the priority is building a Joburg-based engineering hub to serve the rest of Africa and feed Spinnaker’s wider delivery network in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.