A Software Insider's Point of View

CORPORATE WHISPERS AND MONTHLY MARKET TRENDS*
Starting this month, we’ll be splitting the trends in Corporate Whispers from the People Whispers series.  Catch the latest monthly random thoughts, trend points, and corporate trends.  Hearing from twitterati, software execs, and industry experts about:

User trends

• Recent win by SUSEN Software over SAP enhances validity of the used software market in the EU.  Other players like Used Software have battled Microsoft to open up competition in the market.  Many CIO’s hope that Nellie Kroes at the EU will investigate the lack of third party maintenance options and anti-competitive behaviour in some segments of enterprise software (i.e. Oracle DB, SAP, etc.) before her term expires.
• Hybrid deployment options continue to gain ground.  Conversations with over 101 software decision makers highlight a shift from single source vendor strategies.  Move to support hybrid deployments benefit enterprise service bus and integration providers such as Boomi, Pervasive, and Informatica.
• Japanese CIO’s finally realizing that they need to break free from their existing ERP software vendor relationships.  SaaS options now in consideration.  Recent advancements by NTT to host Zoho, Siemens’ 420K employee move to Success Factors, and Flextronics 240k employee deal with Workday have shifted perception that SaaS can’t solve large enterprise requirements.
• Conversations with over 100 EMEA decision makers show a big push to move away from a single source vendor strategy.  Third party maintenance, virtualization, SaaS, Open Source, and BPO top lists of planned initiatives in 2009/2010.
• Support for Apple Macs in corporate environments gaining significant traction.  Despite shipment gains, lack of real corporate support models (i.e. go to the Apple Store to fix your MacBook) do not engender the backing of corporate IT support departments.

Software vendor and system integrators trends

• Ratios of new license to maintenance revenues shift from 1:2 to 1:4 and in some cases 1:5.  Enterprise software vendors now in a better position to convert perpetual business models to subscription business models.  Do they have the guts and board approval?
• Enterprise software vendors slowly adopting Web 2.0 and consumer tech innovations.  Look for improved developments from IBM WebSphere, Microsoft .NET, Oracle Fusion Middleware in the next 6 to 12 months
  
• New Stack Wars will focus on PaaS (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure Services Platform, Google App Engine, NetSuite Business Operating System, Sales Force Force.com platform) vs On-Premise (HP, IBM WebSphere, Microsoft .NET, Oracle Fusion Middleware,) vs Open Source Stacks (BitRock, Covalent, Novell, OpenLogic, Optaraos, Red Hat & JBoss, rPath, Simula Labs, SourceLabs, SpikeSource, Unisys, Virtuas, and Zend.)
• Indian System Integrators competiting for market share in Europe, Middle East, and Africa as they shift away from the North American market.
• Many enterprises have looked into acquisition and partnerships withAll Scripts - Misys, Cerner, Epic Systems, McKesson, MEDITECH, , NextGen, and Siemens Healthcare (Shared Medical Systems) in order to get in on the proposed healthcare and electronic medical record (EMR) proposals.
• One of the first SaaS busts has occurred with LucidEra going under and competitor GoodData offering free safe harbor.  Is now the time to make sure SaaS escrows exist?
  

Your POV

Got a scoop or something to share? What are you hearing in the market?  Please post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com and we’ll keep your anonymity.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions.  However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.