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 [...]

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 [...]

The Year Of SaaS Shows… And Yes, In This Economy.

The recession continued to take its toll on software sales with a slight impact to the SaaS vendors.  Growth rates have come down from the high 30’s to the low 20’s.  But with “flat” the new growth metric in this down economy, SaaS vendor results remain [...]

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, [...]

New Changes Hint At Hasso’s Priorities
In a not surprising update, SAP makes changes to Executive Board and management.  Here are the changes:

Gerhard Oswald becomes COO. Gerhard has experiences in support, consulting, education, custom development, and quality.Gerhard’s contract has been extended till December 31, 2011.
Point of View (POV):  Gerhard’s been a long-timer at SAP with 30 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Competition Intensifies For The Small And Medium Organization’s Software Budget

Software vendors such as Oracle and SAP can no longer rely on their large enterprise customers for double digit year-over-year growth.  In fact, their customers have not only reached a saturation point in being able to consume new solutions, but have also faced demands to cut [...]

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, [...]

Oracle’s Fusion Apps Addresses A Broad Set Of Horizontal Modules

Oracle’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison announced the code completion of Fusion Apps in today’s late afternoon keynote.  Though Ellison did not give precise guidance on general availability (GA), he did hint that the product would be available, “sometime in 2010″.  The product currently [...]

Complete Customer Addresses Today’s Market Conditions
On October 5th, D&B Purisma Solutions group announced its first hosted business data management app.  When generally available in November 2009, Complete Customer will deliver a customer database that will be self managed by organizations departments.  Organizations and their departments will take ownership of their data in a hosted offering.  [...]

Free Software Gimmicks From Some On-Premise Vendors Only Address The License Cost Issue

Recently, readers and clients have been approached by on-premise vendors offering free software modules to incentivize new license purchases.  However, free should not be confused with the Open Source (i.e. Freeware) movement, where source code is provided with minimal copyright restrictions.  Free should [...]

This post was collaboratively written on a wiki with my colleague Jeremiah Owyang whose focus is on customer strategy which encompasses social technologies. Together, we’re covering convergence of the emerging and incumbent technology system.  This entry is also cross-posted on his blog.

Jive Offers Brand Monitoring Using Radian 6 -Empowering Companies To Quickly Respond
Jive Software made [...]

Potential Announcement of * Siemens cancellation represents a shift in mood by one of SAP’s most loyal customers
What’s been rumored for the past few months has now publicly been confirmed discussed.  Golem.de (Babelfish Translation in English) *Wiwo.de,(Wirtschaftswoche the German equivalent of BusinessWeek) (Babelfish Translation in English) reports that Siemens says SAP Tschüß (i.e. ciao, cheers, [...]

This post was co-written with Jeremiah Owyang, Partner and Colleague at Altimeter Group

Above: Pictures from Salesforce’s event
Salesforce.com launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?
Salesforce.com’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks [...]

Emerging Technologies Alter The Approach To Enterprise Strategies…
The proliferation of and access to emerging technologies by the business user challenges organizations to rethink their enterprise technology strategy.  Consumer technologies have proven to be not only more innovative and collaborative, but also quite accessible and equally reliable when compared to existing enterprise tools.  The result - [...]

When I read about CRM failure rates, I tend to focus on the positive – a majority of companies now are at least somewhat satisfied with their CRM deployments. Why?  The front office is full of free-wheeling knowledge workers — impatient, process-averse, and led by revolving door executives.  So, why are the expectations so much [...]