The Old Farts of Enterprise Software

Good friend MR Rangaswami writes a thoughtful piece about the "youth drain" in enterprise software.

I worry less about the age of the customer-facing side of the industry. The average salesperson and consultant is in the 30s and 40s and mirrors the age of IT and business buying centers. If anything, when I take clients to India and in general to SIs, they fret about the average staff age of 24. Not enough gray hair or business process knowledge. The day care model.

I do worry about the age of the software itself. We are in release 6, 8, 12 of products which have been tweaked along for 15, 25 years. I worry about the industry trend of buying mature companies, rather than investing in new R&D. There is so much innovation going on with web 2.0, mobility, telemetry that I write about on my New Florence blog, and very little of that is making its way, quickly enough into enterprise software.