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), offering local enterprises a cheaper alternative to the support contracts sold by SAP and Oracle with their ERP systems.
ARC has taken a minority stake in Spinnaker South Africa. Takeo Mozaki has been appointed MD, while John Gill, Spinnaker's vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will oversee the wider regional roll-out.
According to Spinnaker's founder and global CEO, the operation includes a dedicated support center in Johannesburg. Matthew StavaDue to alignment across time zones, the company already employs around 15 people, supported by other regional centres, primarily London.
Although it officially launched this week, Spinnaker has been quietly operating in South Africa for almost two years, signing up customers ahead of the formal launch. One of them is Telkom, whose chief digital officer, Sello Mamakau, told the Joburg launch event that the operator had saved “about R800 million over five years” by stepping up its Oracle support – although he stressed that price was not the only deciding factor.
spinnaker support Founded in the US in 2008 to support customers running Oracle's JD Edwards enterprise software. About four years later Stava expanded the business into Oracle and SAP support, 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.
intonation
Its basic tone is that organizations should have the option of expensive OEM software support, and not be forced into expensive system upgrades that do nothing for revenue despite the hefty price tag.
“Upgrading finance or manufacturing is not adding value to your business, right? It's just operational. And if it works and it works really great, why are you changing it based on what a company out of Germany is telling you?” Stava asked pointedly.
Reading: Reunert's IQBusiness focuses on technology consolidation
Spinnaker estimates savings of 55-65% versus vendor rates, but Gill said the larger number lies in deferred upgrades. He cited an Australian bank that was spending about A$40 million/year to keep its Oracle databases on a supported version before switching.
Spinnaker is betting on its local presence and rand-based pricing as a differentiator against rivals like Rimini Street. Although its go-to-market strategy is mostly direct, it has partnered with iqbusiness as a channel partner, among others.
Underpinning the move is Stava's view that the role of ERP systems like SAP and Oracle will diminish over time as agentic AI improves. He said companies and their technology leaders are aware of this and are looking to redirect spending away from ERP support and maintenance toward innovations that are likely to drive returns.
“What I'm starting to see is less SAP, and more best-of-breed software being pulled in for certain parts of the process. (In the future) data is going to sit in some kind of data lake, and you may start to see agentic AI start to run some of these processes that ERP is traditionally running today,” Stava said.
Not everyone shares that view. SAP and Oracle are embedding agentic AI into their core ERP suites – SAP through its Juul Assistant and Oracle through its growing range of AI agents – in a bid to keep the ERP layer central rather than 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 – powered, he said, by existing customers wanting help migrating from Oracle. Locally, the priority is to build a Joburg-based engineering hub to serve the rest of Africa and feed into Spinnaker's extensive distribution network in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Reading: US cyber security giant makes big investment in South Africa
“We want to earn the trust of those customers. It's important that we're here for the long term,” Stava said. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media