A Software Insider's Point of View

Who Says Support Has To Be Bundled With Maintenance?
About a decade back, vendors would offer support and maintenance as two separate line items on their contracts.  Support would run about 5 to 10% the license fee and so would maintenance.  Keep in mind, average support and maintenance fees were under 15% back then.  Here’s a [...]

Analyzing The Demand For Use Cases In Social CRM

Since joining Altimeter Group, I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with my colleague Jeremiah Owyang on Social CRM.  On a daily basis, the requests for Social CRM strategies escalated from all parts of the organization. In fact, requests reflected all facets of CRM including the usual sales, marketing, [...]

Single Instance ERP Harder And Harder To Justify
The holy grail of an ERP implementation used to be the single instance deployment.  However, market forces, a move to adopt new disruptive technologies, slow pace of innovation from incumbent vendors, and high maintenance fees have changed many organization’s perspectives.  Add a slew of rapidly changing business requirements [...]

Apps Users Seek Third Party Maintenance For Cost, Value, and Service
Updated surveys from inquiries, client conversations, and user group meetings show a 113.8% increase in interest in third party maintenance (3PM) services from Q3 2009 to Q1 2010 (see Figure 1).  Key factors stem from (see Figure 2.):

Continuing cost pressures. Budgets continue to be at [...]

Chatter Represents SFDC’s Unified Move Into Social

Announced at the 2009 Dreamforce conference, Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform.  Software built on the Force.com platform will gain the collaboration capabilities.   Solutions in AppExchange will be able to use profiles, real time streams, and other API’s.   With a 100 customers testing out user experience, [...]

Apotheker’s Contract Not Renewed.  SAP Puts Snabe and McDermott In Co-Ceo Roles.

Rumors began circulating early this weekend that Léo Apotehker’s contract would not be renewed.  The highest level sources had confirmed this early in the morning and the afternoon press release provided confirmation of the details.  A few key facts:

SAP moves back to [...]

IBM Adds A Leading Customer Data Integration/MDM Pioneer To Its Master Information Management Arsenal

With arguably 10 master information management acquisitions since 2003, IBM continues to push towards its goal of adaptive master data management (MDM) (see Figure 1).  The recent acquisition of Initiate Systems comes after the heals of Oracle’s purchase of SilverCreek Systems in [...]

Informatica Enters The Battle For Master Data Management Dominance

As with any best of breed market, only a few will survive and even fewer will succeed.  Despite a leading offering, Siperian’s faced a rocky financial situation over the past 12 months.  Many suitors pursued Siperian but in the end Informatica’s $130M acquisition of Siperian took one [...]

Gains In SaaS Adoption Driven By Speed And Cost Savings…
Preliminary data from Q4 earnings data show continued traction among SaaS solutions.  Expect SaaS deployments to gain steam in 2010 as organizations finalize their SaaS apps strategies to take advantage of 7 key benefits:

Richer user experience - SaaS apps bring Web 2.0 usability to the enterprise [...]

The Era Of CIO Dictatorships Ends With 2009

Less than 5 years ago, the mighty CIO controlled his or her organization’s destiny by shepherding multi-million dollar projects and ruling with a fist. Business leaders had to pay homage to the IT team and they hated it.  The economic crisis, advent of the cloud and SaaS, and [...]

Standard Support Returns After Much Deliberation

SAP announced today that they would be reintroducing their Standard Support offering. Customers now gain choice with a 2-tier maintenance offering. Here are the details between standard support and enterprise support.

* Standard Support Offering reintroduces at 18%. Customers seeking core bug fixes, support packages, risk mitigation, and related new functionality will have choice in staying on standard support. The program is designed for customers who seek to keep their systems up and running. Customers with CPI clauses in their contracts will want to take note - the first set of consumer price index (CPI) price increases will begin January 1st, 2012.
* Enterprise Support remains at 22%. SAP will continue to offer Enterprise Support at 22% for new customers and a ramp up for existing customers (see Figure 1). Enterprise support includes features such as best practices for IT operations, proactive monitoring and reporting, and transparency for business process performance. Customers who choose to go with Enterprise Support prior to March 15th, 2010 will be eligible for ramp up.
* Supplemental offerings still available. Other programs such as Max Attention, Safeguarding, and Product Support for Large Enterprises (PSLE) will continue to be available by choice and invitation.

Lawson Acquisition Brings Healthcare Focused ERP To Last-Mile Patient Management Solutions

On January 11th, 2010, Lawson Software announced it had closed a $160M all cash offer for Healthvision, a healthcare software solution headquartered in Dallas, TX.  The deal continues Lawson’s deep commitment to industry verticalization and is notable because the deal:

Expands Lawson’s vertical footprint in the [...]

High Cost Of Ownership And Changing Requirements Drive SAP Users To Seek Optimization Solutions

As users await SAP to regain its mojo (see Dennis Howlett’s post) and implement it’s “Voice of the Customer” strategy in 2010, users must continue to reduce their cost of ownership and complexity. In addition, rapidly changing business requirements require some users to seek SaaS alternatives, additional point solutions, and extensions.
Consequently, vendors providing SAP optimization and extension solutions represent one of the fastest growing parts of the $78.7B (2009 Altimeter Group estimate), 850,000 SAP service partner and developer ecosystem. SAP users already embrace many of the solutions from vendors on this inaugural SAP Optimization List as part of their business value oriented apps strategy. The living list covers seven areas including:

1. application extension and usability;
2. application life cycle management;
3. archiving, storage, and test data management;
4. license management and optimization;
5. Microsoft Office integration;
6. third party maintenance; and
7. virtualization

I’ve had considerable time to catch up on reading this holiday season.  Traditionally, it’s a time for predictions, resolutions, and reflections.  But as we close out the last decade, I couldn’t help but dwell on economist Paul Krugman’s Op-Ed from December 27th titled “The Big Zero”.   He brings up good points that it’s been an [...]

Keep In Mind Basic Rules Still Apply Regardless Of Deployment Option

The proliferation of SaaS solutions provides organizations with a myriad of sorely needed point and disruptive solutions.  Good news - business users can rapidly procure and deploy, while innovating with minimal budget and IT team constraints.  Bad news - users must depend more on their [...]

(Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.)
Re-innovation Now At The Heart Of SAP’s Focus And Strategy
SAP has faced a rough two years.  From the continuing market pressure on new license revenue, false-start launch of Business By Design (ByD), management restructuring, and issues with [...]

Begin Apps Strategy Projects With Bite-Sized Entry Points
Complexity often plagues today’s apps strategies.  With tight budgets, limited resources, and little time, organizations need to find bite-sized entry points. The need to meet ever changing complex business requirements requires a four-step, basic (A,B,C,D) approach:

Align your business requirements with the hierarchy of business needs. Every project [...]

DSAG project team and project leader departure could signal disagreement with methodology not SUGEN
SAP embarked on an ambitious program to prove value in its Enterprise Support fee hike last year.   As planned, SAP should announce the results for the first set of SUGEN KPI’s in early December.  However, two key SUGEN KPI project sponsors [...]

Building Innovation With And Around Your SAP Environment
Location: Manchester CentralAuditorium
Date:23/11/2009
Start Time: 16:25
End Time: 17:00
Speaker: R “Ray” Wang
Company: Partner with Altimeter Group
Keynote summary:

Pace of change continues to increase in market forces, work dynamics, business models, and pace of technology adoption.
Innovation is essential in this market.
There’s a tonne of innovation at SAP. Management and politics keep it [...]

SAP users in UK and Ireland remain equally skeptical about SAP

(Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.)
The SAP user group hosted its annual event.  Conversations with 37 clients reflect the following broad trends in the UK and Ireland:

SAP users remain skeptical about benefits promised by SAP [...]

Purchasing in Q3 reflected both economic downturn and summer doldrums.  While on-premise vendors continued massive double digit declines in year-over-year new license revenue, SaaS vendors faced some pressures in keeping up with tremendous growth.  However, long term economic outlook still favor SaaS players and early indications on Q4 budget flush indicate that SaaS and Cloud [...]

Perspectives 2009 highlights continued market, corporate, and product transformation

(Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.)
Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Epicor hosted over 1500 partner, customer, and employee attendees at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, NV.  Conference highlights include:

Update on Epicor 9 adoption. Epicor has (deployed 11/19/2009 [...]

Rapid SaaS Adoption Will Lead To A Repeat Of 1990’s Best Of Breed Integration Challenges

The proliferation and rapid adoption of SaaS solutions stems from 7 key benefits: richer user experience, rapid implementation, frequent cycles of innovation, minimal upgrade hassles, always on deployment, subscription pricing, and scalability (see Figure 1). Despite these benefits, organizations head full [...]

Market pressures and organizational maturity drives new master data management (MDM) trends
Conversations with 31 leading edge organizations seeking business transformation highlight shifts in the MDM trends of the past.  Organizations awash in data need to move beyond the clutter and get to the information.  More data does not equate to more information.  In order to [...]

Epicor Succeeds On Delivering A Converged Product Line
Epicor’s latest release, Epicor 9, provides a proof point that an acquisition intensive vendor can keep their promises to both acquire and deliver on innovation.  Under the themes of “Protect, Extend, and Converge”, the Irvine, CA based mid-market software provider committed to its customers to support prior releases, [...]