Many of the systems-integration companies that are in a position to deliver such services, often also don't want to do it for fear of losing out on their business partnership status with the software vendors, Hamerman said.

"The third-party software maintenance market is a viable market," and one that is going to remain largely unaffected by the outcome of the SAP/Oracle dispute, he said.

"Customers are feeling a lot of pain over the ongoing costs of ownership of enterprise applications," Hamerman said. There is a significant uptick in interest in third-party services especially because many enterprise applications such as human resources and payroll are fairly stable and are rarely in need of frequent vendor updates or support, he said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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