A Software Insider's Point of View

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Connect.  Collaborate.  Innovate.
Welcome to the first of many Altimeter Group research reports.  Before you dive deep into the Customer Bill of Rights: Software-as-a-Service report, we wanted to share with you a bit about the research process and how we work within the community.

Connect.  We strive to bring new people together and share our knowledge.  Knowledge [...]

This post has been cross posted on the Enterprise Advocates blog
A New Way Of Creating Research - Collaborative Input And Review
Some time early next week, we (i.e. Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and I) will be publishing a Customer Bill of Rights - Software-as-a-Service.  Through the generous input of 57 collaborators and organizations, this document [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launch starts countdown to 100 days of innovation until Oracle Open World
In short, Oracle is putting forth a suite of middleware solutions that not only enable developers and software publishers to build their future solutions, but also deliver the middleware tools that will serve as the foundation for its go forward [...]

Infor announced two new maintenance options for its customers today. These actions represent a proactive approach to provide its customers with new ownership models.  The key offerings include:

Flex Upgrade: customers move to the latest application version, no change to existing maintenance and support costs, little or no license fees
POV: Support and maintenance fees should often [...]

Infor surprised many software industry veterans this morning with its acquisition of SoftBrands. Why?  Well, Infor competitors have been spreading FUD that the company was out of cash, the company was in severe debt, and the company could not execute any more acquisitions.  Well, this acquisition puts a kabash on such talk.  In fact, having [...]

With 2009 rapidly becoming the “Year of SaaS” and the tipping point for Cloud Computing, it’s hard not to notice the growing number of SaaS start ups (along with the legacy application vendors rushing to provide an “On-Demand”, but not really multi-tenant deployment option).  My snarky SaaS bigotry aside, we can expect hybrid deployment options [...]

Most software vendor license revenues took a beating this CY Q1 when compared to 2008.  SaaS vendors managed to post double digit gains while only a handful of on premise vendors eeked out a positive gain.  Major highlights in the 2009 Calendar Year Q1 include

Big losses in YoY license revenue for on premise vendors such [...]

(Photo: Rimini Street movable billboard outside SAPPHIRE 09.   Courtesy of Rimini Street.  All rights reserved)
Almost one year after Rimini Street announced its intention to provide third party maintenance, on May 11th, 2009, the ground breaking support services provider announced that it had signed its first SAP clients and launched immediate availability of its support [...]

(Photo: Sapphire 09 Outside the South Concourse of the Orange County Convention Center.  Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved)
Despite the unusual heat wave in Orlando, FL, the SAP faithful and prospects gathered for ASUG’s Pre-Conference Seminars.  These hard core users came to learn more from the detailed educational sessions and to network [...]

Oracle President Charles Phillips pleasantly surprised Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Collaborate 09 attendees this morning during his keynote with the decision to waive Extended Support fees for a number of product lines through 2010 and 2011. As customers and prospects face one of the worst global economic crises, proactive relief on support and maintenance [...]

More details have emerged on the actual 10 or 11 KPI’s that SUGEN and SAP have agreed to as well as the SAP’s targets for showing value.  To start with, here are the main KPI’s for each category:

SUGEN KPI’S
Business Continuity

Increased business solution availability
Reduced amount of work related to all SAP incidents (including reduced [...]

Since SAP’s announcement of its single tier Enterprise Support plan last July, customers have continued to express dissatisfaction.   In response to such complaints, the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN) of 12 SAP user groups and SAP have been engaging in discussions around the value derived from this new offering.  This morning SAP [...]