Sandhill Group’s well known annual event – The Enterprise 2005 held last month looked at the changing enterprise software market along the dimensions:
- What will the enterprise software ecosystem look like?
- What are the "next big thing" product trends?
- How do we leverage current market shifts for a business advantage?
- Where are the smart VCs and investment bankers placing their bets?
- What will enterprise buyers want from software vendors?
Ken Berryman, Bruce Richardson, Vinnie gave their first hand impressions earlier ,Sandhill along with Mckinsey has now published the summary of the event wherein it notes that the primary imperative for the software industry has shifted from a focus on costs to one on revenue growth with strong profitability. Business model innovation was cited as a more important growth vector than technological innovation. A cautious optimism about the future prevails within the software industry. More than 50 percent of attendees believed their companies would achieve more than 20 percent growth in revenues this year – and believed the industry as a whole will grow revenues at 3 to 6 percent. Revenue growth remained the primary imperative for attendees – although business model innovation was also a source of much interest. Key themes discussed included software-as-a-service (SaaS), service-oriented architectures, open source, and China and India as the next big markets. A worthy note about the key idea.
SaaS : SaaS has received increasing attention as a popular delivery model for customers. The urgent need to reduce IT cost and complexity, particularly operating cost, is driving experimentation with multiple forms of SaaS models. Although large enterprises do not yet appear to be replacing effective, large-scale systems with SaaS alternatives, the SaaS option suddenly becomes perfectly viable for all enterprises when it comes to adding new functionality.
The report concludes that, the software industry still lags in one key area – customer satisfaction.Although customers no longer value cutting-edge technology over business results, the software industry is still evolving when it comes to offering a total customer experience. Software industry vendors must address not only such well-known issues as increasing business value delivered, reducing total cost of ownership, and improving software return on investment(ROI), but also the aspects of customer interaction that contribute to the overall customer experience.Worthy read considering that this is perhaps the only one of its kind event covering the fast changing enterprise software market and is a summary of opinions from very high level industry participants as against the general analyst impressions( mosstly disjointe & uni-dimensional) that we routinely get from other sources.
Category : Enterprise 2005
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