Jeff Nolan, a fellow Irregular, fresh out of SAP, writes a state of the union on the enterprise software industry. He comments about SG&A in the industry, the overhyping of SOA, the neglect of the SME market - all stuff I harp about on this blog.
But I find myself disagreeing with him when he says "...there are no new big killer apps that are going to be built for today’s enterprise. Global business has spent the last 40 years automating every corporate function that is worth automating, and then they automated it again through “process reengineering” and once more when that didn’t work out quite like everyone thought."
The problem is a lot of that automation is one off. Look at the amount of custom built banking software, utility billing, airline reervations, retail merchandising, insurance claims processing, mortgage processing. Well built, and importantly well priced, enterprise software will continue to sell. And in its absence, companies will continue to invest in more custom code or look at BPO alternatives.
Like many what I call Enterprise 1.6 fans, Jeff believes the action will move to more end user driven application development - the collaboration and community driven look and feel and process flows. But that does not kill the continued need for calculation and controlling engines. Especially in a world, where only a small and shrinking percent of business transactions is initiated by or aimed at human users. Wikis and blogs and other social networking innovation mean squat to the growing population of sensors, bots, spiders and event driven triggers that increasingly drive B2B traffic.
