Courtesy of Jason Busch I saw this Oracle white paper (registration required) which advises organizations NOT to invest too much on spend analysis projects .
I think it is good solid advice - better than what the analysts are providing. I would just change a few words per below (italics mine)
"Many organizations are spending millions of dollars and countless man hours on ERP, CRM and other enterprise software spend analysis projects that do not deliver on the promise that our and SAP's salepeople have made of global sourcing.
Organizations are struggling and devoting increasing resources including expensive third party implementation resources to elaborate, long term spend analysis projects around our software ...."
Seriously, why not also recommend customers only implement general ledger functionality as against complete ERP functionality, or just SFA versus more elaborate CRM functionality...and while at it why not also issue Oracle's own version of the Magic Quadrant for these categories?
Vinnie - I thought I was the anti-big-package guy? But I certainly can't argue with your emphasis above ...
Posted by: Ric | July 24, 2006 at 05:45 PM
What's next...oh wait...I can see it now..."SAP applications require 40% less spend analysis than Oracle..."
Posted by: Jason Corsello | July 24, 2006 at 07:48 PM
Vinnie, I really like your sarcasm and I take it with respect and seriously. The reality, or, better - the fair perception of the customers is that the vendors today make too way complex products pushing then to thousand manday projects and finally leading the customers unsatisfied.
I'm not arguing whether the perception is justified but rather tend to agree that it's widespread among the customers.
I'd expect from you instead of a repeatitive pitch on returning a portion of earned money back to customers or decreasing maintanence fee by 20% to offer a next generation solution.
The reality of today is the applications are naturally complex, projects are a must part of customisation (nobody can predeliver and deploy a vanilla version), and it's all getting just worse.
Since (according to the numbers) there is no real leader on the market I can imagine that other SAP's competitors have quite the same problems (at least the customers through the same reproaches).
How to change it? What is the strategy? The SOA-implanted applications? SAAS-like injections? Outsourcing? Googlisation?
I'm eager to read a thorough solution. It's getting worse at the time being...
Posted by: Roman Rytov | August 03, 2006 at 05:02 PM
Roman, always good to hear from you. Let me give you a real life example from a few weeks ago. I was helping a compnay review their IT budget. As we walked through the s/w maintenance spend I kept asking for each vendor - will you upgrade, do you see much value - 90% of the portfolio the answer was No, No, No...if that CIO could get half off the maintenance with the money he could hire another 30% of staff and invest in newer technologies. He has every incentive to aggerssively negotiate with the 90% in that portfolio.
The fact is s/w vendors think they do a good job "recycling" the CIOs dollars. At this stage most of the major vendors do not because they are using 2001 dollar assumptions. I could using open source, SaaS, global labor build or support so much of the stuff myself - why should I not.
What percent of Larry's staff is now in India? and what percent of thsoe savings has he voluntarily shared with his customers?
Give me innovative new products at 2006 economics and I will be delighted to say Buy Now. Buy Lots. Buy Even more.
Posted by: vinnie mirchandani | August 03, 2006 at 05:21 PM