Sightings in SaaS

Oktoberfest is the 16 day festival in Bavaria that celebrates the harvest. With amenities like these who can argue with the idea:

beer and beauty

Thinking about the Enterprise Software market recently it dawned on me that we have entered our own Octoberfest Harvest celebration, almost universally. Harvest refers to the last phase of a product’s life when the marketing department comes to the conclusion that there isn’t much left to exploit, so cut all inputs and just harvest whatever value is left in the product. In enterprise software this phase appears to have happened across many vendors and products at roughly the same time. Let’s take a look:

• Microsoft purchased several vendor offerings including Great Plains, Axapta, Navasion and has done little with any of them. There was originally a thought about turning some of these into SaaS offerings, or merging the best of these products into a new MS product, but over the past couple of years there hasn’t been any news in this area. MS is all about consumer products and its operating system. One wonders why they purchased all of the software that they did, unless it was simply because they could. Google ‘microsoft business applications’ and on page one you will find this note from 2005 about MS’s big plans for their latest acquisitions.
• Oracle also went on a buying binge and they were pretty honest about the fact that they believe the market for enterprise software was leaving the growth stage and sliding toward consolidation. However they also said that under their ownership all of these products, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Oracle’s own applications, would undergo some serious tuning up, and that there would eventually be a fusion product allowing all of the best functions into a new product. The fusion middleware became a reality earlier this year, and we await the fusion applications. In the end, the innovation is really about supporting fewer products and upselling a new fusion app to currect customers.
• Sage has also acquired several products over the years and they are definitely in harvest mode. Their apologists even offer the idea that Sage is not in the technology/software market so much as the confidence market, as in this software will be around for a while. They, like SAP, have taken a poor swing at a SaaS product but have yet to make contact. Dennis Howlett doesn’t think they are really interested in launching a new SaaS version anyway.
• SAP has a SaaS product that they have been trying hard to keep under wraps for the past few years. Evidently they did not architect it in a way that allows them to scale the service profitably, even though they sell an account with a minimum of 25 users at $149/month/user, $44,700 a year. You would think you could make money at this, but who knows. When your core products attain 40% margins by virtue of their maintenance alone, you have a business model that is going to be very difficult to duplicate in the SaaS model. And what of the core products? Any innovation there or just bloatware additions that add a few more users and maintenance dollars to the annual bill? I haven’t heard of a game changer in a long time, so harvest mode once again. How important is harvest over new sales? The big news for SAP in 2008 was a huge fight with the user community over an uptick in maintenance fees. If the proof is in the pudding then that was an olympic pool of pudding.
• Any big innovators out there other than the SaaS offerings like Workday, NetSuite, Intacct or WorkingPoint?

Vinnie Mirchandani, the deal architect, spent several days at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm and complains that the event was severly tilted toward consumer technologies. And when the attention does turn to enterprise matters, the topics are usually around other technologies that may use the enterprise transaction processing systems as a platform, but are rarely focused on business process innovation.

As someone who has spent, and continues to spend, a good deal of time on enterprise business process questions, problems and solutions, I wonder why the marketplace has turned as it has? Do  most organizations have the business processes that they need, creating the value that they want? Is it a case, then, of been there, done that and we’re good?

Or have organizations simply lost their enthusiasm for business process design and innovation? And if they have, then why have they? I meet very few enterprise application users who have mastered their processes, yet it appears from the evidence that no one seems too concerned about just moving on to whatever’s next. My question is have enterprise software applications simple sapped the strength of enterprise users? Has the bloatware complexity of products like SAP, Oracle, Sage and Microsoft simply exhausted organizations? And at this point do they just accept the fact they have an expensive business system that has ceased creating value but which it too difficult to move out of the way?

Oktoberfest can be a good time, but the day after can also be a a helluva hangover. Is this the way enterprise software buyers are feeling about their business applications?

Enterprise buyers feel affects of software inebriation