A few days ago I wrote about the downward trend in project success rates, one of the hidden reasons I mentioned was the increase in large enterprise application and ERP upgrades over the past year. As I mentioned, one of the downsides of the suite or all-in-one approaches taken by large vendors is the enormous, and consequently costly and risk-prone, projects to implement or upgrade those application suites.
Computerworld reports on Gartner Group's recommendations that software manufacturers move to offering more "bite-size" software options for companies, to give them the flexibility to upgrade components of their systems asynchronously, without having to roll out an entire new enterprise application suite just to get the new warehouse management functionality, for example. Of course the additional benefit to companies would be that such a "bite size" component approach would also reinvigorate large ERP vendor competition from Best-of-Breed niche players in particular segments. I find it questionable how much motivation the large vendors such as SAP or Oracle would have to break their applications into these bite-sized chunks, especially as they are already hungry for ways to drive additional revenue. And then of course, there is the issue of integrating all of these bite-sized pieces into a meal fit for a global enterprise. As I have written, integration projects have their own challenges as well.
I must admit I find this new call for more component-oriented enterprise software humorous, as we are only 18 to 24 months past the height of "suite" solutions being all the rage and offering companies significant opportunities for savings through a common platform.Having been in the enterprise computing space for quite some time, one can see that this is just another example of the pendulum swinging back and forth at ever-accelerating rates.
I have always been a fan of component-based solutions, and have actively developed component-based frameworks and platforms at my own firm, usually to great competitive benefit for us and significant benefits to our clients in terms of maximizing the functionality, quality, time and cost equations in their favor. In the case of the enterprise application space, I have always imagined the best solution to the general problem of best of breed versus single-vendor suites would be the development of a unified standard data model, or backbone, that application vendors can plug into to deliver functionality. This provides the primary benefit of a unified suite, zero integration cost, with the primary benefit of best-of-breed, access to the best-suited functionality for a company or industry. Unfortunately, other than a royalty scheme paid by application vendors, there is no way for the provider of the standardized data platform to be compensated for the design and support of the data model, as well as the standards certification of various vendors. It would also take an enormous force in the computing world to make this happen, such as an IBM.
As an aside, and I'm not sure whether it is Gartner or Computerworld that is to blame here, but the article directs the need to break up large enterprise software to SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. The problem here is that IBM doesn't actually make enterprise applications. It kind of makes one wonder how well these consultants or journalists know the markets they serve.
If you have comments about this topic, suggestions for future topics, or questions related to the governance of the IT function or the business-centric use of technology, feel free to e-mail me at eyetoIT@gmail.com.
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