A Software Insider's Point of View

Recent Conversations With Executives Confirm Demand For Social CRM

Good news! Organizations see an opportunity to tap into the proliferation of social networking channels for their CRM initiatives.  Speaking with 23 business leaders over the past 10 days, it became obvious that Social CRM initiatives were top of mind for a few reasons:

Pressure from the boardroom. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Convergent trends fuel the push for new business solutions and platforms
The future of enterprise software is evolving from web-based apps, business process platforms, and service-enabled products; to a new class of more connected, social, and collaborative business software solutions.  This transformation comes from advances in the Web 2.0 world and a growing realization that business [...]

Many user groups currently meet the basic requirements…
Today’s independent and vendor sponsored user groups serve a key role in building community among a common interest group.  Typical mission and objectives often include:

Creating an environment to share information and best practices
Exposing issues and limitations with a vendor’s product and partner solutions
Soliciting member feedback and concerns about [...]

On-premise vendors still see SaaS as a loss leader due to huge ramp up and punishing revenue recognition rules

When it comes to the topic of SaaS, many on-premise vendors appear to be living in denial, hoping that SaaS fails, and/or creating confusion in the market place.  These tactics have merit as a shift to SaaS [...]

Pivot points represent a market segmentation approach used by many companies to determine market demand, define new products, assign sales territories, service customers, and put boundaries around customer sets.  Since September 2009, over 500 enterprise software decision makers were asked which one pivot point would they prefer their software vendor focus on.  The four key [...]

Economic Downturn Challenges Enterprise Software Executives To Uphold The Sanctity Of The Vendor - Customer Relationships

Conventional wisdom would assume that in a challenging economy, strong relationships would be a key success factor to retaining business and mitigating loss of revenue.  Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case for many companies, including vendors in [...]

Economic Downturn Challenges Enterprise Software Executives To Uphold The Sanctity Of The Vendor - Customer Relationships

Conventional wisdom would assume that in a challenging economy, strong relationships would be a key success factor to retaining business and mitigating loss of revenue.  Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case for many companies, including vendors in [...]

Economic Downturn Challenges Enterprise Software Executives To Uphold The Sanctity Of The Vendor - Customer Relationships

Conventional wisdom would assume that in a challenging economy, strong relationships would be a key success factor to retaining business and mitigating loss of revenue.  Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case for many companies, including vendors in [...]

Recession creates an opportunity for frank vendor - client discussion

A fine equilibrium exists between the vendor’s success and a client’s success.  Its time for the enterprise software industry to have a frank and honest conversation about software costs and vendor business models. To date, comparing cost among different vendors remains difficult as license, maintenance, implementation, [...]

Economic Downturn Challenges Enterprise Software Executives To Uphold The Sanctity Of The Vendor - Customer Relationships

Conventional wisdom would assume that in a challenging economy, strong relationships would be a key success factor to retaining business and mitigating loss of revenue.  Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case for many companies, including vendors in [...]

Economic Downturn Challenges Enterprise Software Executives To Uphold The Sanctity Of The Vendor - Stakeholder Relationship

Conventional wisdom would assume that in a challenging economy, strong relationships would be a key success factor to retaining business and mitigating loss of revenue.  Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case for many companies, including vendors in [...]

Now’s The Time To Assert Your Rights
With the market now in favor of the enterprise software licensee, its now time to update the Enterprise Software Licensee’s Bill of Rights to include newer topics such as virtualization, SaaS and subscription pricing, newer usage based pricing models, open source, and vendor lock-in avoidance.  As mentioned in a [...]

Almost every inquiry over the past 3 months has ended up with at least one question about what vendors are doing to help their clients amidst an economic recession.  As blogged in the October 12, 2008 posting on “5 Steps to Restoring Trust in the Vendor - Customer Relationship” the issue of credibility and trust [...]

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So as I’m thinking about what to write for this week’s Monday’s Musings, I thought I’d poll the twitter universe on what software vendors could do to make things easier during the recession.  Here’s the current twitter stream of thought and thanks to all of [...]

Four Years Into This Job And It Remains As Exciting As Ever
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about life as an industry analyst. In fact, the last post was January 25, 2006, in the old Analyst 101 series. At that point, I was reflecting on the job during my one year mark.  In fact, I [...]

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 [...]

Software Ownership Remains Unusual, Onerous, and Restrictive
Software licenses are truly unique.  Licensee’s can not resell, reuse, or share their licenses with others. For example, enterprises easily reuse, resell, or share tangible assets such as hardware, telecom equipment, and storage. From both a replacement and life-cycle perspective, leases for assets such as telecom equipment incorporate a [...]

Current Model Lopsided Towards the Large ISV’s
Rapid enterprise apps vendor consolidation over the past 5 years leave end user enterprises with fewer vendor choices and less competition.  The impact to services firms is a continued and increased dependency on the fortune and “good will” of the software vendor by IT Services firms.  However, ISV’s [...]

So it’s that time of year for holiday cheer and pundits to tempt fate and pontificate.  Here are some very very draft predictions for 2009 in order of most likely to least likely to pan out:
End user predictions

Heavy discounting continues for new license. Discounts include non-monetary concessions such as training, implementation, integration, and other [...]

After more than 350 conservations with customers about the maintenance and support issue in the past 4 months, it’s becoming quite clear what users expect from their software vendors.  While those issues can be broken into tens of categories, three themes have emerged that include:

Choice. Customers want to choose between tiered plans.  The best plans [...]

Conversations and polling at recent user group meetings confirm a common sentiment that user groups should play a role as client advocates with the vendors.  Information dissemination, benchmarking, product issues, training, and maintenance fee reductions rise to the top of the list in this 235 person on-going survey.  While not explicit in all charters, [...]

Falling revenues, crumbling custom systems, and declining budgets often bring municipalities, state authorities, and related agencies together to gain efficiencies in vendor selection, purchasing power, implementation, maintenance, and support costs.  End users in the private sector seeking long term efficiencies may want to take a page from the public sector and consider shared services [...]