The notion of enterprise customers as large monolithic technology purchasing entities is on a decline. This perhaps was first visible in sales people popping out their credit cards to buy subscription to salesforce.com. However, the trend is expanding with more and more of social web principles being applied to enterprise software. For some time now, Spiceworks has been making inroads – this is is a free ad-supported IT management tools, and has over 700,000 IT professionals and system administrators – who as we know control large purchasing dollars in enterprise customers.
Such behavior has perhaps existing for far longer in SMB/SOHO segments, especially owner driven organizations. In my view, this represents a significant shift in how enterprise software will get developed, distributed and monetized. The most popular web applications like email, chat, news etc are already seeing the personal-professional divide blurring – not to talk to blackberry which blurs the time divide between personal and professional lives, and iPhone logically extends the notion on a feature set basis (is it a consumer phone or a business phone?) Future software will be designed around people, encompassing their personal and professional lives – personalization to the core.
- Promoters or Entrepreneurs – A choice for Private Equity players - August 3, 2019
- Startup Marathon Mindset - March 25, 2019
- What’s your Customer Culture? - March 4, 2019
We are reaching towards world where software code would cost zero.
Its Use value will determine the price of software.
Now use value is very tricky word. Use value would have impact on various senses of human. we are now focusing on attacking those senses through use values.Eg google
In this entire process we are noticing one important aspect SaaS or IVR or xyz various services are shaping to replace human process handling. But in overall process software is reducing price not human labor price is reducing values.
You can still compare salary of 2001 passout in engineering and 2009 passout see the difference.
So finally what is happening….FREE SOFTWARE word look very good but SOLUTIONS r always driven through price paid by use value.
I have very rough concept for you…why can’nt we have 1 US$/per search query software. Just see after 10 years….what quality we would reach in search engines.
But would you think big enterprise vendors like IBM, Oracle, HP and SAP will so easily pull out their hands deep inside so many customer pockets for so long? As facts go, for long there’s been so much of “Cloud” rattle and no real big bang. After such a long drought you expect hurricane grade rains and not just localized showers 🙂
Then CIO’s will also have to overcome the paranoia spread by big vendors that consistently raise security/scalability issues with SaaS, thrash all things Cloud, pay per drink. (Larry Ellison still retains his founding stake in SFDC, so the fear lurks any time he can cut a check and cannibalize it before you say SaaS).
To sample the big vendor hypocrisy, here’s the excerpt from the information week interview given by John Wookey, SAP’s head of On-Demand applications –
“…SAP won’t develop software services that compete directly, as independent SaaS applications, with companies such as Salesforce.com, Concur, and Ariba…. Rather, all of SAP’s on-demand apps will be designed as extensions of Business Suite.” Enough said of the big vendors wide moat strategy – guard the core on-premise product with a series of surrounding “best of breed” SaaS and endlessly keep sermonizing on SaaS innovation!
A fallout of the decline of large monolithic purchasing entities also reflects on the “consumption” and purchase of software.
Enterprise & it’s constituents are no longer buying the whole enchilada at one go. Instead, they’re going piecemeal — sales automation, marketing automation, support systems, content management, etc. are being bought individually. The technology is also helping there; Open APIs, non-proprietary hardware/software, high degree of integration capability and above ability to scale on demand.