“On that note, it’s time to take a battering ram to European business software giant SAP, it seems. “SAP will continue to battle it out on the sales front, but the reality is that business intelligence (from the Business Objects acquisition) is the feeding tube keeping the old man alive,” it snipes. “As customers contemplate costly upgrades or inflexible maintenance, and others consolidate to be more agile, SAP has no new generation to offer. The duct tape and shoestring fixes are unrealistic, and companies now have credible alternatives (Oracle, NetSuite, and others)” – suggesting only decline awaits for the Walldorf legend.”
from November 17th, 2010 publicTECHNOLOGY.NET article “2011: The year Ballmer goes, HP struggles and the Cloud dominates?” by Gary Flood
In my November 14th post “With SaaS-Sprawl Fear Tactics Falling on Deaf Ears and Continuing Lawsuits 2010 is a Year most ERP Vendors Would Probably Like to Forget! Yet Few in the Industry Tell the Story?,” I raised the question as to why many mainstream pundits continue to overlook the reality that is the disintegrating ERP vendor landscape. Kind of a lone voice in the woods call out to the industry, hoping for an echo of perhaps similar views from somewhere out there in the seeming infinity that is the virtual realms of the Internet.
ERP Vendors . . . down for the count?
Well, and to borrow a line from the world of science fiction . . . I/we are not alone after all! There is in deed life out there, confirmation of which came back in the form of a November 17th article from the UK-based publication publicTECHNOLOGY.NET.
Making references to life-support feeding tubes and duct tape, the Nucleus Research “Big in 2011” prognostication upon which the article is based is interesting, timely and ominous for what they called the “Walldorf legend.” And while I am still not sold on the remains of the day being divided up by acquisition-hungry Oracle and IBM, just the fact that someone else is shouting out that the Emporer has no clothes is telling.
What are your thoughts? Do you believe that SAP is in fact rotting from the inside out, held together by the external veneer of its once former (real or perceived) greatness? If you think about it, wasn’t Rome once a great empire?
Remember to take our poll and tell what you think . . . are ERP vendors going the way of the dinosaur?
30
Procurement Insights 
Steve Christensen
November 18, 2010
SAP may be struggling, but in reality all ERP vendors AND Best of Breed vendors are struggling. Customers realize the risk, cost and disruption these systems cause to their business and know that it is not worth it. This message has been in the media for sometime. The software vendors realize it, too. So you are not alone.
The next generation of enterprise systems won’t be cloud based ERP, either. That is just a differnt serving of the same problem. The future will be a new generation of enterprise computing that builds on top of the ERP/Best of Breed. You can’t afford to rip and replace, modify or integrate the existing applications. Instead, Enterprise Apps leverage and enhance the existing systems and allow business to dynamically control the operation, process, data and technology their business requires to remain competitive. Constant changes in compliance, regulation, competition, products, geographies, customer demands, etc. have always outpaced ERP/BoB. Enterprise Apps are custom-built in less than 15 minutes, protect your existing systems command and control, and can deliver the gains in visibility, collaboration, productivity and accuracy that every business needs to improve scale and yield.
What I would caution anyone from predicting, however, is that the ERP/BoB vendors will not go away. For many years, people predicted the death of the AS/400. While it may have changed its name…it is still there, running multi-billion dollar businesses.
Steve
Ed Pound
November 18, 2010
I can;t speak to all aspects of ERP systems but, concerning operations applications, the ERP vendors are still hyping their solutions as if the technology is still groundbreaking–which it’s not. Companies all have some IT system to track transactions and SAP, ORACLE and others do a poor job of helping companies beyond basic transaction and record tracking for which ERP systems are very well suited. How can a vanilla inventory optimization application, which SAP or ORACLE has to sell to maintain scale, provide any competitive advantage to a company when that company’s competitors all get the same thing? Customization is not really suited to SAP and ORACLE, though they would love it for all the extra revenue it generates.
Large ERP vendors are selling pre-packaged solutions that don’t provide much competitive advantage because there is no strucutured science behind how they design systems for a particular company.
Agreed large ERP vendors won’t go away but, hopefully, companies are beginning to realize the pied piper element in the sales pitch for large ERP implementations.