Is consolidation stifling innovation and customer-centricity?

It started in the spring of 2003 and has been going on since then. I am referring to the consolidation among the enterprise application vendors.

I remember the good old days of ERP when there were a handful of vendors- BaaN, QAD, SAP, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft.  BaaN was the market leader in the beginning and boasted of clients like Boeing. The technology was client-server, clients belonged mostly to manufacturing, consumer goods sector and were FORTUNE 500 firms.

It’s interesting to see that almost all technology trends, at least in the enterprise app domain, start from the big FORTUNE 500 firms and then everyone else jumps on to the bandwagon.

Anyways, almost all the big 8 (BIG 5 later) audit firms opened an ERP consulting arm and body shopping for developers was rampant. New types of applications were launched by many small vendors- SCM like i2, manugistics; CRM like Siebel; Datawarehousing/BI/BW etc…..

So, all was hunky dory till the market became saturated towards end of the 90’s. Almost all FORTUNE 500 firms had implemented ERP and the days of astronomical billing rates per hour were over. BaaN disappeared without a trace and so did one of the BIG consulting firms. Outsourcing, off-shoring was in demand. SOX came in and audit firms had to divest their consulting arms. The clients were now SMEs and wanted value for money solutions.The left over ERP vendors responded by going on a mad consolidation spree.  Kind of like Megatron chasing the “AllSpark” cube . It started when Oracle made a hostile bid for Peoplesoft,  JD Edwards merged with Peoplesoft and so on…..More than 50 acquisitions happened in a span of half a decade. SAP responded with counter bids in a few cases. And all this did not happen due to an economic recession. Enterprise applications market has been in a recession of its own since 2000.

When the dust settled, only four big vendors were left in the enterprise app space: IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft. And now they sell everything from database to middleware to GUI and even hardware.New licence sales is down and they are surviving on maintenance revenues (part of the reason why JDEdwards, Peoplesoft are still surviving as products). These BIG 4 have a plethora of products some of them meant to do the same thing. Whoa!! their sales force must be a confused lot…One of them sells 3 MDM solutions all meant for PIM , another is targeting SMEs with 3 acquired and one in-house product…. and still clients aren’t happy. Why ?

Is creativity and customer-centricity dead? These BIG 4 do not listen to customers? They are just happy pushing their fancy possessions down the throat of hapless customers? Or is it the other way round: customers have become so cost conscious that they have stopped supporting new and better ideas/products.

I can see a ray of hope. Customers are still willing to reject the solutions put forward by the BIG 4 vendors and buy enterprise software from small niche players. A look at any of the Magic quadrants reveals an interesting story. Even though the big fish gobbled up the smaller ones , new fish are still being born and they are surviving. Hope is alive.

LONG LIVE CHOICE…..

Stress levels in an Enterprise application implementation project !!!

I had read somewhere that the sperm count of stock-brokers (the Wall Street crowd) fluctuate in line with the Dow or NASDAQ ups and downs . Similarly, if one were to plot the blood pressure of an enterprise consultant who has embarked on an implementation; what would it look like? Or for that matter his/her cholesterol level?

BTW, stress can be measured in 5 quick ways:
http://academic.cuesta.edu/wholehealth/Level2/Lecpages/str07.htm

I suggest a much simpler method: just count the number of cigarettes smoked in a day by the consultant. I am yet to come across a good enterprise consultant who does not smoke. In fact, I have observed that all the “eureka” moments happen while taking a smoke break. Just observe a bunch of enterprise consultants smoking together and u would feel as if all their brains have fused together into a big “brain bank” aka the SUPERMAN planetary council. All inhibitions, prejudices melt away and they all belong to the “huffing-puffing” clan!!

Ok, coming back to the topic, when do you think the stress levels would be the highest and the lowest? Or in which phase of the implementation project would a consultant smoke the highest number of cigarettes?

Would stress be highest towards the start of requirements gathering workshops or just before cut over, go-live??
When would stress be lowest? During the build phase or during blue-printing?

I saw this graph which used a bucket shape to describe the stress levels of a vacationer.

http://wtflabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/phd092809s.gif

Isn’t it quite similar to our enterprise application projects too? We are highly stressed while starting the project (vacation), and then slowly feel as if the project should never end. Finally, the stress level shoots up at the end…..

Thank god for Marlboro……..

PS: I am not promoting smoking and am not a smoker myself  

A consultant’s job!!!

I came across this interesting piece while browsing. It talks of how an architect designing a house would get his specifications if they were to work like web designers.

If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers (http://www.digitalsurvivors.com/archives/000455.php)

think this is true for SAP or any Enterprise Architect as well. I have conducted many a requirements workshops and have realised at the end, that the customer themselves don’t know what they want…..

Finally its all about delivering what the customer “needs” and not what the customer “wants”. This means we achitects need to sell not only the solution but first the requirement as well…
It might include citing an industry leader’s best practices or quote SAP books/how-to guides to sell the requirement…

Some customers might think of this as just another example of trying to force the vanilla package down their throat especially since SAP MDM still does not have industry specific templates/repository business content.

The wonderful world of enterprise applications!!!!

I was just pondering today… What has been my biggest learning from enterprise application projects over the last ten years….Not all these projects were resounding successes.
Just as in life, as someone said: “all happy families are happy in the same way but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique way”. Similarly, in all the projects which were not so successful, there was something new and unique to be learnt.
And “if u don’t fail, u can never become a good leader”. Wait, this is actually a dialogue in one of those Hollywood flicks that start with earth being in danger…
Ok, so coming back to the world of enterprise applications:
Many of these projects were managed and run by project managers who had no clue of what the enterprise application package involved (ERP, CRM, MDM, SCM etc…) does or can do, especially if its a cutting/bleeding edge technology or a niche area. At least at a 30,000 ft level, they should know what the heck is going on… Ok maybe not at 30,000 ft, that’s too high and maybe the CXO zone but at least at 10,000 ft…
But then, in most outsourcing firms, these so called managers are retired consultants who have lingered long enough in the fast paced IT world to be pushed up and up untill they become project/delivery managers or the fancy “lead/principal consultants”… But that’s the subject of another blog…