A Software Insider's Point of View

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
As always, thanks for your emails and alerts. If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line! If you need a referral, and we’ve worked together in the past, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.
Paul Alessi is now a Buyer [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
As always, thanks for your emails and alerts. If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line! If you need a referral, and we’ve worked together in the past, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.
Roger Bottum became VP of Marketing [...]

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.

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
Congratulations to all!  Good to see that the job scenarios continue to improve in software/tech as a number of individuals made organizational changes and promotions.  As always, thanks for your emails and alerts. If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line! If you [...]

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 [...]

Title: Industry Event: Sapience 2009
Location: Hyatt Regency Cambridge, Cambridge, MA
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-12-08
End Date: 2009-12-09
Description: In 2008, SAP announced a 30% maintenance increase. For the first time in history over, 100 SAP customers spoke out publicly, organizing a press conference to express their deep frustration not only about the increase but also about [...]

Title: User Group Event: SAP UK & Ireland User Group Conference and Exhibition
Location: Manchester Central (GMEX/MICC), England, United Kingdom
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-11-23
End Date: 2009-11-24
Description: The largest most comprehensive UK & Ireland conference for SAP users, the SAP UK & Ireland User Group Conference and Exhibition will take place at Manchester Central (GMEX/MICC), on [...]

Most on-premise vendor continue to slip into significant YoY losses in license revenue and overall revenues.  Meanwhile, economic conditions continue to favor SaaS, best-of-breeds, and purpose built solutions. Major themes in the 2009 Calendar Year Q2 include:

Economic conditions drive demand for best of breed and point solutions delivered by SaaS deployment.  Consequently, SaaS vendors posted [...]

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, [...]

Title: User Group Event: Convention USF 2009
Location: CNIT - Paris La Défense, France
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-10-14
End Date: 2009-10-15
Description: La Convention en bref
Evènement incontournable de l’ecosystème SAP, la Convention USF est l’exposition dédiée aux utilisateurs SAP.
Lieu d’échange et de partage, cet évènement est une occasion unique de dialoguer autour des problématiques qui vous intéressent [...]

Labor Day (US Holiday) traditionally marks the end of summer BBQ’s, the beginning of the fall conference season, and yes, the time to begin a review of your software maintenance contacts that expire end of year.   As clients prepare for this seasonal ritual, a few trends in 2009 should set the stage for negotiations:

Continued [...]