Vinnie provides a wonderful coverage of Enterprise 2005, highlighting that conflicting priorities summarized the tone of the meet. Some good ideas that got discussed in the meet which he covers include:
- A keynote speech summarized the turbulent state of the software industry – “Investors want growth AND profitability. Customers want innovation AND viability. Employees want options AND stability”.
- The convoluted process of consolidation & the seeds of continued fragmentation are being sown by the "consolidators".
- Opportunities abound for intrepid vendors as the bigger vendors rationalize acquired architectures and modernize existing ones. This would keep them
a) Keep them inwardly focused for a while and
b) Reflect expensive migrations for their customer bases. If focused vendors could price alternative solutions at rates economical compared to the migration cost- they could carve out chunks from these vendors.
- India and other offshore markets will increasingly move from services to developing packaged software.
- A "Star Alliance" similar to what has happened with international airlines. Instead of acquisitions, there could be shared branding, delivery, capacity sharing.
- Software companies need to become more like Accenture or Infosys or just focus on product development and let partners provide services.
- Rolling out semi-finished software - as “20% of code provides 80% of customer value ,moving away from the" bad habits” of frequent releases and maintenance revenues”. “Using opensource hosted components to bring costs down & ability to leverage offshore engagements to bring down R&D costs.
I beleive that consolidation along platform players, ecosystems & innovative startups would constitute the future landscape. Few more things that to my mind looks significant are:
- May be this is the start of age of discontinuity - we may see newer type of applications emerging.(It would be the case of fast Vs slow ,innovation & responsiveness largely helping the case of vendors)
- Composite applications would begin to evolve more fast and could become an important element in tthe emerging enterprise landscape.
Category :Enterprise 2005.
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