A couple of weeks ago, I wrote Improving Incumbency is the best innovation
This week, I saw two very contrasting vendor approaches to tackling the incumbent efficiency issue.
IBM whose 85% of revenues defines “incumbency” – from software, data centers, maintenance of legacy applications 10, 20, 30 years old suggests in its CEO study that we move beyond a focus on incumbency
“In conducting this study, it’s not hard to understand why. CEOs are looking beyond the benefits of connected supply chains and more integrated back-office systems. Their focus is shifting to the power and potential of recent advances in social media and analytics to reimagine connections among people — whether that’s customers, employees, partners, investors or the world at large.”
Translation: Don’t focus on squeezing our revenues from incumbent DB2, Tivoli, Notes, SAP contracts even though we have not made them efficient over the last decade. Help us expand the 15% in analytics, customer experience and newer practice revenues.
Why not do both? How about IBM showing how to squeeze the former to pay for the latter, and other innovations that companies are lining up?
In contrast, I got an invite to a NetSuite webinar “Why it’s time to upgrade from Great Plains to Cloud ERP”. What I liked was the no-pretense theme and the fact that two customers will talk about their migrations and payback.
Not high-falutin themes, but a focus on improving incumbent operations. Concept Enterprises “simplified and accelerated its financial close and benefits from anywhere, anytime visibility into key business metrics, customers, orders and suppliers.” Revolution Prep “streamlined complex recognition of deferred revenue upon delivery of service (complying with GAAP) for students who pay weeks in advance for a course.”
As an innovation author, I love to hear about and profile IBM’s Smarter Planet projects and NetSuite’s cloud innovations. In the end, though, IT spends so much on such more mundane incumbent operations that we cannot afford to ignore the efficiencies there.
The elastic Workday
We have long written about the elasticity of the cloud computing business model. Salespeople in the field have just as long used FUD about the supposed rigidity of its applicability. It only works for small and mid-size businesses. It only works well in the service sector.
Really?
I was pleased to see Workday share names of some of its recent customers. In parenthesis are the industry sector and workforce size.
The main pattern here is Workday, since its inception not just recently, has shown it can work in a wide range of enterprise sizes, industries and countries.
July 20, 2012 in Cloud Computing, SaaS, Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)