A Software Insider's Point of View

With a few days left in the year, it’s hard to believe that 2008 is almost over.  Just like our paltry .401K’s and lowered gas prices, it’s like we reverted to the Dot Com bust.  Extreme contrasts in positions and tremendous change made 2008 both exciting, suspenseful, and frankly sobering like 2002.  In fact, it wasn’t just the pace of change, it was an intensity of change like no other.  For example in the topical areas I cover:

Software vendor economics:

• Identifying recurring revenue and market share acquisition targets to investing in co-investment partners and solution centric ecosystems
• Believing that the tech industry could be more resistant in a downturn to the current bloodbath in Q4 and bleaker projections for 2009
• Assuming that vendor consolidation earned the right to command price increases and maintenance hikes to retreating and rethinking policy in the face of customer rebellion and revolt
• Ignoring vendor financing options to embracing credit as a survival tool
• Driving new license growth to relying on maintenance and professional services revenues
• Poo pooing multi-tenant SaaS and hybrid deployment and development methodologies to looking to invest in lower delivery cost core Cloud Computing skill sets

End user enterprise apps (ERP) strategy

• Engaging in large vendor selection projects to reducing the number of vendor suppliers
• Building the best SOA strategy to figuring out how to justify all the investment
• Sole sourcing from one vendor to considering purpose built apps
• Dismissing SaaS as as fad to embracing Cloud Computing as a cost savings tool
• Adopting standard middleware platforms to exploring PaaS and hybrid deployment options and related integration options
• Focusing on growth and strategy business drivers to reverting to operational efficiency and compliance business drivers
• Crafting a long term apps strategy to recession proofing an apps strategy
• Moving to all packaged apps to reviving custom development

Software Licensing, Pricing, and Contract Negotiations

• Locking in new license pricing to reducing shelf ware
• Negotiating on new license prices to zeroing in on the cost of maintenance
• Focusing on future product road maps  to avoiding the risk of a revenue led software audit
• Planning for upgrades to contemplating third party maintenance
• Worrying about vendor consolidation to considering vendor viability and the need for software escrows
• Thinking about maintenance as an insurance policy to seeking value from maintenance contracts

Master Data Management - Customer Data Integration

• Contemplating deployment of multiple data entity MDM to proving the value of one data entity with the ambition of multiple data entities
• Applauding rapid implementation times of 1 year to expecting results in 6 to 8 months
• Expanding data governance roles to focusing on specific stakeholder data processes
• Turning to the incumbent ERP vendor for one throat to choke to considering all options
• Ignoring BI strategy and focusing on enterprise architecture to incorporating BI into MDM projects

Order Management

• Reducing inventory to improving transportation management costs and back again
• Focusing on multi-channel selling to driving efficiencies in multi-channel fulfillment in a perfect order
• Emphasizing partner channels to taking back ownership of distribution
• Moving away from piecemeal solutions to purpose built order management hubs

Project Based Solutions

• Considering PPM apps to seeking broader Project Based Solutions
• Standardizing on project management methodology to reducing the barriers to adoption
• Deploying only in one option to expecting various deployment options such as mobile, SaaS, and offline

The Bottom Line - Customers Still Have High Expectations For Enterprise 2.0 Apps

Despite the bleak economic outlook, like in 2002, we can expect significant innovation to emerge as new business models meet technology innovations.  Conversations with over 1000 end users this year highlight that customers still expect to see Enterprise 2.0 innovations in the next 3 to 5 years, despite any downturn.  The top seven key Enterprise 2.0 innovations include:

1. Richer user experiences - role based scenarios across various usability paradigms
2. Business process orientation - support for end to end business processes
3. Configurable change - designing with flexible models and rules instead of customizations
4. Actionable insight - pulling all the key information to make a decision in the context of business process and user role
5. Collaboration - providing secure private interactions and open and innovative connection with stakeholders
6. Intelligent response - responding to contextual models and business events
7. Hybrid deployment - deploying all models from on-premise, hosted, instance virtualization, multi-tenant SaaS, and cloud based BPO.

Let’s just hope these humble 2009 industry analyst predictions hold some water.

Your POV.

Do you believe we’ll turn the corner like 2002?  Are you experiencing different trends?  You can post here or send me a private email to rwang0@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.