Innovation & Enterprise Software

Innovation would be the mantra for growth & survival for enterprise software players, including those seen as walking dead – In the valley it is innovation driving the growth.Vertical search gets a welcome boost from a company you may not have heard of. David L. Margulius writes about innovation happening inside large enterprise users and points out even in vertical search arena, t Google could not come up with vertical search - search that does a better job of finding results in a given domain because some human know-how’s been applied to limit the results set? While guessing that it may be seen as boring compared with all the other fun things Google’s been doing. But in any case, good old Fidelity Investments beat them to it with http://fidelitylabs.com fidelitylabs, a “financial search” beta that searches only financial Web sites. He highlights that Fidelity to FedEx (innovator in IT-driven logistics), Dell (IT-driven supply chain), Wal-Mart (POS data and RFID) and a few others provide a basis to offer a cogent counterargument to the Web 2.0 hype machine. VMware’s progress in the last 1-2 years – today EMC is said to be beating numbers owing to VMWare’s tremendous performance in the market. The continual advances of the SaaS segment, BPM segment all makes one hopeful of seeing more innovation and progress happening in the enterprise software segment as well. I recently wrote,atleast in respect of the enterprise software, which is closer to the heart of CIO’s its clear – as I had always been telling - while vendors are addressing market realities to keep their industry vibrant and with http://123suds.blogspot.com/2005/04/enterprise-software-market-new.html consolidation fever ahead - one could clearly hear the voice :whether customers would benefit a lot because of this, add the need to make more innovation happen and absorb faster. No,I am not talking about Marc Benioff finding SAP innovation free, while I certainly agree with his perspective that observers tend to overestimate the creativity and innovation that entrenched technology companies can bring to a particular problem and underestimate the effect of business-model conflicts that lurk behind the scenes ( as applicable to all majors). Innovation need not not be always of the disruptive type but every type of Innovation counts. In today’s hypercompetitive world ,simply put innovation is non-negotiable and innovation streak is of very high value to enterprises.