The Bionic Enterprise Software 2.0

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster." -The Six Million Dollar Man.

Bionic Man did not just get a nose job. He was rewired with nuclear powered limbs and implants and much more.

This weekend, several of the Enterprise Irregulars had a vigorous discussion going around Enterprise 2.0 - the impact Web 2.0, social networking, SaaS etc. are having on the enterprise.  And I kept coming back to the point that any definition of Enterprise 2.0  (or whatever we or Forrester ends up calling it) has to be fundamentally rewired. It cannot just reflect the exciting new user centric innovations but also what is happening in the middle and the back in terms of service delivery, third party maintenance, IP licensing and a whole series of other innovations we have been seeing over the last few years.

I proposed the following as additional considerations as our group (and the software industry in general) seeks to define Enterprise 2.0. While by no means comprehensive, it is my attempt  to get a broader discussion going.

a) supports choice of customer deployment of functionality as a service, and in installed mode

b) is architected and priced/sold as a series of services

c) sells maintenance broken in to support and upgrade charges and allows an ecosystem of partners, not just the publisher, to alternatively provide support.

d) largely automates bug fixes/upgrades which require little customer (or service partner) intervention

e) provides process management, configuration, conversion, integration, testing, systems management, end user training tools to minimize implementation and support labor

f) provides customers with a wide range of service partners which are audited, graded and certified each year based on product training completion, customer feedback,

g) commits to transparency to customers around product quality, customer service ticket resolution, outages (where provided in SaaS mode) etc.

h) provides a mechanism for certification of integration of third party software products, and re-certification as releases change

i) actively encourages a on-line developer/integrator community and pushes for an "open source" licensing of community intellectual property

j) Commits to sharing with each customer a "sticker" showing standard list of various components/services and various discounts and taxes

k) shares with customer base on a regular basis summary results of various implementation and support metrics from its service partner ecosystem

Most industries are seeing innovation in many facets from business models to channels. So is enterprise software.  And even within technology specific innovation, Web 2.0 is only one facet. Enterprise software is adopting telemetry, predictive analytics and so much more. 

As we innovate enterprise software, we will fix way more than the nose.

Clarification: Most of the practices I suggest above are already in use by one or more enterprise software vendor. On c)  SAP offers third party maintenance through its TomorrowNow unit to Oracle apps customers. On g) salesforce.com provides metrics on its on-line performance. And customers like these innovations - so my suggestion we generalize them across the industry.

Comments

[Thomas]

Vinnie, is that 6 million list price or after discount !-)

Thomas, using contemporary SaaS models, it will be 20K for each body part per month for next 3 years with 99.9& guaranteeed uptime and 2 hour repair turnaround time...

[Nick Fera]

Thanks for your email. You may remember me, I was President of the Alcar group in Chicago until 1998, and Doug Barton (later of Hyperion, ClosedLoop and now Cognos) was my CFO/Product Manager.

My concern with the long list of items is that few, if any firm can be all those things and make money. The examples you cited are each individual examples of one or more of the things on the list, not the whole list. And I'd argue that those decisions by SAP, Oracle and others are market driven, not Ent 2.0 driven. IMO, the transformation of some business models is constantly happening (and has been for years), and is customer driven. I see Ent 2.0 as a convenient name to group a number of activates, not the recipe for each step to be successful, and that's how I read the list, as well as others I have seen.

As for the industry broken...I'm not sure its ever been right. We're only really about 20 or so years old, 25 at most. The maturity of enterprise software is at best similar to an adolescent teen. We've got alot of growing up to do.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Nick, You are right all the "innovations" are market driven. But the important thing
is buyers seem to like them. Why not propogate? I doubt any vendor could adopt
all of them - but then no customer ever implements everything in a software
package either...

I find the software industry defensive at times. Hey, we all evolve and
improve...is that not we are all in technology? As we are defining Enterprise
2.0 why not have a set of goals?

[Charlie Bess]

My feeling is that in order for it to be Enterprise 2,0, it must have a much more direct effect on revenue and margin than the vague case made for social networking. I'm all for social networking software, but please...

[John McCall]

Just a few words about Open Source Software. Since the adoption of open source has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers. Open source software began as a marketing campaign for free software. OSS can be defined as computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Some well known OSS products include projects such as Linux,Ubuntu,OpenOffice, Firefox, Apache, the GNU Compiler Collection, and Perl. www.net-ebooks.com