...only we can do that to our pledges". Animal House.
Thomas Otter of SAP takes offense to Dennis Howlett "Calling our customers laggards is low, shallow and simply plain wrong. It is also downright rude."
What Dennis is saying is core, non-verticalized ERP is at end of life (geez: it has had a good 25 year run) and new adopters of such software are late ones. Perhaps Thomas would prefer them to be referred by the Gartner politically correct term for such customers - Type C. And Gartner calls them C if they adopt technologies with a market lag of 18 to 24 months. For as long as core ERP has been around, its new customers would be Z types.
I will tell you what is downright rude. SAP, Oracle, their partners smiling and telling such customers they are the salt of the earth, and trying to charge them economics which do not reflect the years of R&D amortization and the economies of implementation scale which should come from over 100,000 such projects.
Most of the customers I know in government, utilities and other generally Type C industries (for ERP - they lead other industries in adoption of many other security, sensor and other technologies) will happily say they are laggards, but do expect end of life pricing and lowered risk.
Of course, the ERP vendors are doing their best to spray paint innovation and being incredulous - how can you even think of calling us or our customer laggards?
I have a suggestion. Mark Cuban recently called the Internet "dead and boring". Let's give him a chance to play referee and decide if ERP is just slightly more dead and boring - or just plain laggard.
